On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 9:32 AM, John Rusling
<jrusling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
All this is about moving away from JD Edwards on
the iSeries, which is very integrated to our ERP, to a cloud?
product called Workday, for HR, Payroll, etc. Lots of fun in store.
Workday is in some sense the successor to PeopleSoft. I'm frankly a
little surprised (not in a good way) that they won't take .xls or
.xlsx files. I mean, those two formats have quite an extensive and
established infrastructure for handling them, and everyone uses one or
both of them in their daily work. But practically no one uses Excel
XML, *except* to pass data around. Very sad.
Anyway, you said they gave you a template. I don't know if this means
you don't have to generate from scratch, but rather just find and
populate slots in the template; or if by "template" you meant more
like "example" to just give you an idea, and you still have to
generate from scratch.
The format itself is not too bad. You could reverse-engineer it
yourself just from looking at what Excel spits out when you do "save
as XML Spreadsheet 2003". But if you want docs, these might be
useful:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10%29.aspx
http://odieweblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/how-to-read-and-write-office-2003-excel-xml-files/
The latter is an Oracle-based blog, but might be adaptable to the i,
plus it has further links to official Microsoft stuff.
Now, if you're OK with using Java instead of RPG, you can make life
easier for yourself, because there are pre-built libraries for this.
The first one I found by Googling is xelem; there may well be more.
(There's also one for Python, but I'm going to guess you're not up for
that.)
Tip: If you search for Excel XML, you have to sift through a lot of
stuff about .xlsx (just as this very thread shows). But it's also
known as SpreadsheetML, which is less ambiguous.
John Y.
midrange.com
