Re: Writing XML from RPGLE

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Vernon Hamberg
<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Then I went back to digging into the OOXML spec - and found that things are
not so bad as I first thought. And that, in fact, the template approach IS a
very viable way to do this.

So you are using CGIDEV2 after all for this?

3. I could use a thing called an inline string instead of shared strings.
- except for being read in the Numbers app in iPads, so I found another
answer =("a string") is a trivial formula that Numbers DOES render properly!

The write-Excel-files-for-use-by-applications-other-than-Excel problem
reminds me of the multiple browser support problem. Apple's stuff has
been notoriously annoying to deal with (worse than OpenOffice.org or
Gnumeric by some accounts).

6. The jar command can be used in QShell to create the final XLSX file from
the constituents, just suppress the manifest file and use the XLSX
extension.

Scott eventually managed to port *and nicely package* p7zip (Unix
version of 7-Zip) for PASE. So you could switch to that. I've found
jar on the slow side, and its compression isn't the best. You can do
better on both counts with p7zip. (Of course be sure to stick to the
.zip format, not 7-Zip's own .7z format.)

Scott's POI support does write to XLSX but isn't the fastest kid on the
block when building larger workbooks

That's why I mentioned his pure RPG work. Last he wrote about it, it
was in the neighborhood of 60 times faster than his POI-based
approach. The only issue is I don't know how fleshed-out it is (so I
don't know what kind of formatting support it has, for example). He
hasn't released it yet, to my knowledge.

Things like borders and other formatting and all isn't easily, if at all,
doable with these tools - but the template approach - or the hybrid that
Henrik has in powerEXT - can do it all very well.

Including reading? I guess I was never really clear on how much you
had to read existing data. Reading existing Excel files can be a much
greater challenge than writing an Excel file from scratch (because you
can control how many features you want to include when writing; but
typically cannot control how many features were used if you're doing
the reading).

John Y.