Using Excel OleDb to get sheet names IN SHEET ORDER

Question

I'm using OleDb to read from an excel workbook with many sheets.

I need to read the sheet names, but I need them in the order they are defined in the spreadsheet; so If I have a file that looks like this;

|_____|_____|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|
|_____|_____|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|
|_____|_____|____|____|____|____|____|____|____|
\__GERMANY__/\__UK__/\__IRELAND__/

Then I need to get the dictionary

1="GERMANY", 
2="UK", 
3="IRELAND"

I've tried using OleDbConnection.GetOleDbSchemaTable(), and that gives me the list of names, but it alphabetically sorts them. The alpha-sort means I don't know which sheet number a particular name corresponds to. So I get;

GERMANY, IRELAND, UK

which has changed the order of UK and IRELAND.

The reason I need it to be sorted is that I have to let the user choose a range of data by name or index; they can ask for 'all the data from GERMANY to IRELAND' or 'data from sheet 1 to sheet 3'.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

if I could use the office interop classes, this would be straightforward. Unfortunately, I can't because the interop classes don't work reliably in non-interactive environments such as windows services and ASP.NET sites, so I needed to use OLEDB.

Answer 1

Can you not just loop through the sheets from 0 to Count of names -1? that way you should get them in the correct order.

Edit

I noticed through the comments that there are a lot of concerns about using the Interop classes to retrieve the sheet names. Therefore here is an example using OLEDB to retrieve them:

/// <summary>
/// This method retrieves the excel sheet names from 
/// an excel workbook.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="excelFile">The excel file.</param>
/// <returns>String[]</returns>
private String[] GetExcelSheetNames(string excelFile)
{
    OleDbConnection objConn = null;
    System.Data.DataTable dt = null;

    try
    {
        // Connection String. Change the excel file to the file you
        // will search.
        String connString = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;" + 
          "Data Source=" + excelFile + ";Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;";
        // Create connection object by using the preceding connection string.
        objConn = new OleDbConnection(connString);
        // Open connection with the database.
        objConn.Open();
        // Get the data table containg the schema guid.
        dt = objConn.GetOleDbSchemaTable(OleDbSchemaGuid.Tables, null);

        if(dt == null)
        {
           return null;
        }

        String[] excelSheets = new String[dt.Rows.Count];
        int i = 0;

        // Add the sheet name to the string array.
        foreach(DataRow row in dt.Rows)
        {
           excelSheets[i] = row["TABLE_NAME"].ToString();
           i++;
        }

        // Loop through all of the sheets if you want too...
        for(int j=0; j < excelSheets.Length; j++)
        {
            // Query each excel sheet.
        }

        return excelSheets;
   }
   catch(Exception ex)
   {
       return null;
   }
   finally
   {
      // Clean up.
      if(objConn != null)
      {
          objConn.Close();
          objConn.Dispose();
      }
      if(dt != null)
      {
          dt.Dispose();
      }
   }
}

Extracted from Article on the CodeProject.