Re: Excel Generation Alternatives

hi Paul,

Personally, I use HSSF as a means of replacing reports. We have a ton of reports that are run in daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly batch jobs. I put them in Excel format and e-mail them to users.

Previously we were using 132-column green bar (or blue bar, whichever was cheaper) printouts from a line printer.

The users greatly prefer Excel, and indeed, a lot of them had been taking the data from the old reports and keying it into Excel. But e-mailing a spreadsheet is much nicer. And I can use fonts, colors, formulas, pictures, and so forth to make the reports look nice. Many of these are subsequently sent by our reps to our customers, and I want to be able to format them well.

As these are batch jobs (not interactive jobs) performance isn't usually a big deal. Having complete control over the formatting, however, is.

How would you approach the same thing with the Excel Add-in or with ODBC or something like that? Wouldn't a user have to be sitting in front of it when it happens? Wouldn't that be a waste of their time when a computer can do it for them? Wouldn't it be difficult to insert pictures, format columns, etc?

I don't understand why you think POI/HSSF is "fragile" or "cumbersome". It's true that performance isn't always stellar (though I could say that about every single Java tool I've ever used) but why is it cumbersome? And have you had a lot of trouble with it breaking (i.e. being fragile?) I haven't had any...


On 3/22/2010 3:58 PM, pholm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

All,
It seems that the POI/HSSF is somewhat fragile and cumbersome. What
advantages does the RPG POI "Push" approach have over alternatives such as
iSeries Navigator Excel plug in or using an Excel Web query where you can
"pull" data into excel. It seems the "pull" approaches allows you to
format cells, produce formulas, pivot tables, etc using WYSIWYG built in
Excel utilities versus coding cells in RPG/Java logic? Isn't this much
more productive?
Thanks, Paul Holm