Re: Excel/POI - Here We Go Again

["Jake M" <jakeroc@xxxxxxxxx>]

Can somebody please provide me with the URL where Scott Klement explains how
to use POI HSSF with RPG. Thanks in advance.

cheers,
Jake.

On 9/21/06, Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Strangely, the 'open' returns an address of ZERO for 'book' but does not
> > halt. The exception occurs only when the HSSF_GETSHEET fails because the
> > 'book' address is 0.
>
> That's not strange at all.  In an earlier discussion someone (I thought it
> was you, actually?) was trying to handle situations where hssf_open()
> could fail.  I think he was trying to open a file that might not exist,
> and wanted a way to handle the error properly.  My memory is fuzzy, but it
> was something like that.
>
> Hang on, I'll look up the message in the archives...  yes, it was you.
> Here are the key messages in the thread where we discussed it.
> http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l/200608/msg00733.html
> http://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l/200608/msg00745.html
>
> I probably didn't tell you that I changed it, though..  my fault.  The
> idea, though, is that instead of crashing (and taking the JVM down) when a
> file can't be opened for some reason, it now returns *NULL.  Your program
> and therefore check for that.
>
>       if HSSF_open( '/path/to/myfile.xls' ) = *NULL;
>            ErrMsg ='Unable to open Excel document';
>            ShowErrorToUser(Errmsg);
>            iter;  // try next document.
>       endif;
>
> The following part of your message is the REAL problem, the reason why
> it's failing and therefore returning zero:
>
> >   received Java exception
> > "org.apache.poi.hssf.record.RecordFormatException:
> >   Unable to construct record instance, the following" when calling
> method
> >   "<init>" with signature
> >   "(Lorg.apache.poi.poifs.filesystem.POIFSFileSystem;)V" in class
> >   "org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook".
>
> Excel documents are made up of specially formatted "records" (they aren't
> database records in the manner that we're used to thinking of, but they
> are a record of sorts.)
>
> When the Java code (HSSF) is reading the file, it needs to create a new
> Java record object to handle the record that it just loaded from the Excel
> document.  However, for some reason it's unable to do that.
>
> I would suspect that either it doesn't understand the format of the record
> (maybe it's a feature that HSSF doesn't support) or there's a bug in the
> Apache HSSF code.  Something like that.
>
> Unfortunately, that's outside of my area of expertise.  You could try
> upgrading POI to see if it's fixed in a newer version, or you might try
> searching (Google) for the Java error to see if anyone else has
> encountered it and found a workaround.
> --
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