Overview

This article briefly explains the specifics of RadSpreadStreamProcessing - what is spread streaming, how it works compared to the RadSpreadProcessing library and when to use it.

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RadSpreadStreamProcessing is part of the Telerik Document Processing libraries. The full documentation for this component is available at https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/document-processing/libraries/radspreadstreamsprocessing.

What is Spread Streaming?

Spread streaming is a document processing paradigm that allows you to create or read big spreadsheet documents with great performance and minimal memory footprint.

The key for the memory efficiency is that the spread streaming library writes the spreadsheet content directly to a stream without creating and preserving the spreadsheet document model in memory. Each time an exporter object is disposed, the set values are written into the stream. This allows you to create large documents with an excellent performance.

While reading, only the required chunk of information is parsed to ensure there are no application resources kept without user need.

Key Features

Some of the features you can take advantage of are:

• Export to XLSX or CSV files

• Import from XLSX or CSV files

• Writing directly into a stream; or parsing required data only

• Append new worksheets to existing workbook

• Grouping: Helps you organize data in sections, to be able to show and hide the currently relevant chunks.

• Hidden rows and columns: The API allows you to set the hidden state of each row or column.

• Cell formatting: A number of properties enabling you to apply the desired look to a cell.

• Cell styles: Using cell styles allows you to apply multiple format options in one step and also offers an easy approach to achieve consistency in cell formatting.

• Merge cells: You have the ability to merge two or more adjacent cells into a single cell that spans over multiple rows and columns.

• Controlling the view state of a sheet:

  • Setting scale factor
  • Control over the selection and the active cell
  • Show/hide gridlines
  • Show/hide row and column headers
  • Freezing panes: Keep part of the worksheet always visible while scrolling.
  • Changing the first visible cell: when you would like to show a particular part of the sheet to the user on opening the document in a viewer.

RadSpreadStreamProcessing vs. RadSpreadProcessing

Following are the main differences between the two spreadsheet processing libraries.

• RadSpreadStreamProcessing writes directly into a stream, unlike RadSpreadProcessing, which creates models for the elements in the document. This is why the memory used with the spread streaming library is significantly lower than when using RadSpreadProcessing.
• RadSpreadStreamProcessing does not perform any formula or other layout-related calculations, which makes its file generation performance much better compared to RadSpreadProcessing.

When to Use RadSpreadStreamProcessing

You can use the RadSpreadStreamProcessing library to create or read large amount of data with a low memory footprint and great performance. You can also append data to an already existing document stream. The generated document can be exported directly to a file on the file system or to a stream (for example, to send it to the client).

Required references

You have two options to add the required Telerik references to your Xamarin.Forms app in order to use RadSpreadStreamProcessing:

• Add the Telerik UI for Xamarin Nuget package following the instructions in Telerik NuGet package server topic.

If you don't want to add the all Telerik.UI.for.Xamarin nuget package, you have the option to add a separate nuget package. For RadSpreadStreamProcessing you have to install the Telerik.Zip and Telerik.UI.for.Xamarin.Documents.SpreadsheetStreaming nuget packages.

• Add the references to Telerik assemblies manually, check the list below with the required assemblies for RadSpreadStreamProcessing:

  • Telerik.Zip.dll
  • Telerik.Documents.SpreadsheetStreaming.dll

  Please keep in mind these assemblies are located in the Portable folder, still, you need to add a reference to them in the Xamarin.Forms project as well as in each of the platform projects (Android | iOS | UWP).