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I have a 3rd party app that is exporting data to Excel using the Excel COM Interop. There is a bug in their program causing it to fail before it makes the Excel instance visible. However from where the exception is happening, according to the displayed stack trace, the information I need has already been written out to the Excel Worksheet.

Is there any way to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel namespace to connect to a existing excel instance instead of it generating it's own? Or is there any other way I could make that orphaned Excel instance visible so I can save what it completed?

As a note, the EXCEL.exe is still visible in task manager after the program closes so the instance is still live and running after the app has disconnected.

More Details: What the program is doing is exporting a report from it's own (proprietary) database, however for some reason some record in the database became malformed and causes a Integer Overflow error to occur while the report is generating. Looking at the stack trace it appears this integer overflow is happing while it is generating the summery at the end of the report.

For my uses I do not need the summary just the line items from the report, so I hoped to see what work it had done so far but the EXCEL.exe instance it was communicating with is not visible.

If I run the report for a different date range the report generates fine, it is just something about one record on one day that causes this specific set of inputs that causes it to fail.

The support contract with the provider of the app as expired and management is not interested in renewing it as we are in the process of switching to a new vendor (that is why the report is being generated, to be used as the data-source for the data conversion). So I have been tasked with "fixing it" so the data can be moved over.

Final Update: The reason I asked the question was solved. I was able to go through each record via the program itself and I found the record that had one of it's fields set to 16274176.00 (normal values are in the 100's (and don't ask me why what appears to be a float causes a Integer Overflow error)), once I changed that to 0.00 the report printed fine. However I still would like to know if there is a answer to my original question as I think it would be a useful tool in my toolbox.

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do you have access to the 3rd party source code or any of the source code that Creates the COM Interop Instance..? –  DJ KRAZE Jan 6 '13 at 1:23
    
No I do not (and from what I have poked around in dissassembler it appears to be written in delphi so no tools like ILSpy are available either), I would be writing my own tool to pick up the pieces after the 3rd party app crashed. –  Scott Chamberlain Jan 6 '13 at 1:24
1  
Was the program ever running before without failing? –  erich007 Jan 6 '13 at 1:31
    
Seems that you'll have to invest time. Either export lots of reports with small date ranges and combine them in a single big report, or search for the corrupt data (if you are sure there is) by playing with the date ranges systematically... –  erich007 Jan 6 '13 at 1:55
    
@erich007 I know the date, it just a matter of getting everything I can from that date. (also your first suggestion is my current solution, one export for everything before the bad date, one export for everything after and concat the line items of the two. but I was still hoping to get what I could from the export for that single date) –  Scott Chamberlain Jan 6 '13 at 2:04

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

In regards to your original question, I think it actually might be a possible duplicate of what have been asked here: Get instance of Excel application with C# by Handle

A couple of the answers given points to this blog post: Launching Office Apps Programmatically which gives you a palette of options of how to connect to an already running Office application from managed code.

The blog post as well as the answers given also contains sample code to illustrate how this can be done.

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