Re: Writing XML from RPGLE

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 12:23 PM, Scott Klement
<rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 8/22/2014 11:02 AM, John Yeung wrote:

[p7zip as perhaps a better alternative to jar]

In my tests, I've had problems with this. Has this worked for you? p7zip
seems to use a newer version of the .ZIP specification than Microsoft does,
and OFfice chokes on files created with p7zip.

I have not tried it myself. I always use iSeriesPython to read and
write Excel files on the i. I have only tried p7zip in the context of
working with compressed archives unrelated to Excel. So if you're
having trouble getting MS Office to read p7zip-created .xlsx files,
I'm sure I would have the same problems.

Unless this was fixed on Office 2013? I haven't tried it with that version
of Office, yet.

I wouldn't know. We're on Office 2010 here.

My biggest problem with this right now is the .ZIP
support, because I don't really want to require everyone who uses it to have
PASE & InfoZip (Or Qshell & Jar) installed.

Interesting. I didn't realize anyone *didn't* have Qshell and jar.
Or PASE for that matter.

The Zip APIs that IBM provided
in 7.1 also won't work because they don't have a feature that allows paths
relative to the current directory when generating the zip file.

Hm. Well, I know the Python library I'm using to generate .xlsx
doesn't rely on jar, and I don't *think* it relies on anything in
PASE. I imagine it uses some zlib provided by IBM on the native
"OS/400" side (as one would link to using ILE C, which is the
implementation language for iSeriesPython). Though I guess it is
possible that Python has its own custom ZIP implementation. I haven't
delved too deeply into that. I just know it works.

That depends on why you're reading it. IF you just want to get the data out
of the Excel sheet and put it into a PF or something like that, then it's
easier than you might think. Excel puts stuff like formatting into separate
XML files. So the one you have to parse to get just the spreadsheet data is
not too complex. The only real complex problem is dealing with the shared
string table...

For just data, sure. But the main value that Excel format offers in
the first place is formatting and/or formulas, and these things are
definitely not fun to parse, particularly the way Excel (the Microsoft
application) generates them.

John Y.