ExcelPackage.Dispose() blocks input from serial port

My application needs to open a Serial port and wait for data to be transmitted. After opening the serial port, I use EPPlus to read data from an excel sheet and store it in a list of dictionaries.

However, when I added the Read method, I stopped receiving data from the Serial port. After some testing, the serial port seems to break when .Dispose() is called on the ExcelPackage I use to read the excel sheet.

My Excel reading code is as follows:

public List<Dictionary<string, string>> Read(string fileName)

List<Dictionary<string, string>> dictList = new List<Dictionary<string, string>>();
FileInfo file = Utils.GetFileInfo(fileName, false);

// using statement automatically calls Dispose() which closes the package.
using (ExcelPackage package = new ExcelPackage(file))

// Reads the first worksheet of the workbook
ExcelWorksheet worksheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets[1];
int endColumn = worksheet.Dimension.End.Column;
int endRow = worksheet.Dimension.End.Row;

// Start loop from 2nd row to avoid headers
for (int row = 2; row <= endRow; row++)

Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();

for (int column = 1; column <= endColumn; column++)

// Add key value pair to dict for every column
// key = column header
// value = cell value to string

// key is set to "" if cell is empty
string key = worksheet.Cells[1, column].Value == null ? "" : worksheet.Cells[1, column].Value.ToString();
// value is set to "" if cell is empty
string value = worksheet.Cells[row, column].Value == null ? "" : worksheet.Cells[row, column].Value.ToString();

dictionary.Add(key, value);

dictList.Add(dictionary);


return dictList;



And my Serial Port is opened in a different class:

public BarcodeScanner()

try

SerialPort mySerialPort = new SerialPort(SearchComPort());
mySerialPort.Open();
mySerialPort.DataReceived += new SerialDataReceivedEventHandler(DataReceivedHandler);
isAvailable = true;


catch (Exception ex)

Debug.WriteLine("Error: 0", ex.Message);




The code seems to work if I use

ExcelPackage package = new ExcelPackage(file)


And omit the .Dispose() call at the end, but from my understanding that would cause issues down the line since it makes the Excel worksheet unavailable to other processes.

1 Answer
1

What if you read all the data into a byte array using System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(fileName), get that into a stream, then open the excel file using one of the (stream) overloads of EPPlus's ExcelPackage?

System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(fileName)

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