Re: Excel by XML generation

date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:30:48 -0500
from: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Excel by XML generation

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:34 PM Darren Strong <darren@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We've gotten pretty good at generating spreadsheets with POI HSSF and

the JNI interface, but, the JNI interface is not efficient and the POI HSSF
versions march on while we've frozen our updates due to the move to enums
in that tool. Now, IBM has come a long way in helping us generate XML and
writing it to the IFS, which Excel is based on. Has anyone had success
generating the .xlsx file structure directly as XML files and then zipping
it up in the format that Excel likes? Is there some documentation on the
web I'm not able to find that might give some detail and examples on this?
I would guess that this method would be very fast compared to what we're
using now.

What you describe would indeed produce Excel files faster than how
you're doing it now.

However, what you describe sounds like it entails a lot of
re-engineering things that other people have already done. Instead of
spending all your time and effort reinventing the wheel, I strongly
suggest taking a survey of what's already out there and then investing
the time and effort in adopting one of those. I suspect it will (1)
take less time and effort overall, and depending on which route you
take, may ALSO (2) pay dividends beyond just generation of Excel
files.

John Y.


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message: 5
date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:37:14 -0500
from: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Excel by XML generation

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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