It really depends on what the acceptance criteria is, in my opinion. You don't have to name it to an excel extension, a .csv will open just fine in excel although you do lose some formatting abilities.
One of the things we recently implemented is just having a simple node server that accepts a JSON call via REST using the exceljs node library. Granted this is outside of cache but it does the job.
Depending on your memory settings calling out your reporting result to another service can hit a max string issue unless it takes a pure stream.
There is another post out here that tried to achieve this problem by actually creating html tables in excel (This may be what Charles was talking about but his link breaks for me so I just get a 404), but once again if it's the same approach I am thinking of you hit formatting issues.
One approach I am currently investigating is using an ADO .net connection to pull the data from the cache database and presenting it to the front end using an excel nugget package.
Hope this information helps and good luck, please let us know what you ended up with!
- Chris
Edward,
This may be a silly question but the Business Service in your Ensemble Production is currently enabled, correct?
I have to agree on this one as well. Especially since you can have tasks kick off once a given task has finished.