Re: Excel by XML generation

Flexibility - depends on which aspect you are looking at - with the approach we use, almost any feature of Excel is available, you just might need to learn which XML files are involved and do they have variable data. I like to say, "Let Excel do what it excels at!" For a while I quailed at the prospect of managing shared strings, but it turned out to be pretty easy. OTOH, I'm still quaking in my boots around (so to speak) pivot tables.

Also, changing things when using the CGIDEV2 approach can be a bit of a task.

Abdirahim Musse of IBM and I gave a pair of sessionsat COMMON Insight, I think it was, on doing Excel on i, he presented a lot of options with the open source languages and utilities they might have, as well as some ACS features - cool stuff. He didn't go into much of using something like, is it xlsxwriter, in Python?

Libraries often do not render all the possible features - Scott's service program has the things he needed for his job, I guess it's important to know just what the capabilities are of anything you decide to use. And I don't know that wrapping a service program around method calls in any of the open source languages is the most efficient anymore - or maybe never was.

But lots of options - it's a wonderful world we live in! Even in these difficult times, right?

Regards
Vern

On 12/15/2020 4:40 PM, Jon Paris wrote:

True it is less flexible than using a PHP/Python/Java/whatever library - but most people don't need the ultimate flexibility that a library offers. The template can already include all of the formulas etc. that the user wants. In the past I have had the target user build the spreadsheet they want and then automated it for them.

On Dec 15, 2020, at 4:37 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 4:25 PM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There was a discussion on (I think) the RPG list a whole back on this topic - for some reason Vern comes to mind as a participant. Haven't got time to look it up I'm afraid but somebody was doing it.

Definitely Vern. Possibly others.

Basically the approach is to generate a template spreadsheet, mark up the underlying XML where needed with placeholders, use templating system (in the past I've used CGIDEV2 for this) to modify the template and then zip the xml files up again.

Sounds less flexible to me than a full-blown Excel-writing library,
but if your needs can be served by it, I would think it's a very
(machine-)efficient approach.

John Y.
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