Re: Excel by XML generation

[Gad Miron <gadmiron@xxxxxxxxx>]

I strongly recommend GUMBO's  Excel-erator

https://www.gumbo.com/Licpgm/Excelerator.html

Mxcellent formatting & multiple sheets support.

Been using it for years.

HTH
Gad





> date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:30:48 -0500
> from: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
> subject: Re: Excel by XML generation
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 3:34 PM Darren Strong <darren@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > We've gotten pretty good at generating spreadsheets with POI HSSF and
> the JNI interface, but, the JNI interface is not efficient and the POI HSSF
> versions march on while we've frozen our updates due to the move to enums
> in that tool. Now, IBM has come a long way in helping us generate XML and
> writing it to the IFS, which Excel is based on. Has anyone had success
> generating the .xlsx file structure directly as XML files and then zipping
> it up in the format that Excel likes?  Is there some documentation on the
> web I'm not able to find that might give some detail and examples on this?
> I would guess that this method would be very fast compared to what we're
> using now.
>
> What you describe would indeed produce Excel files faster than how
> you're doing it now.
>
> However, what you describe sounds like it entails a lot of
> re-engineering things that other people have already done. Instead of
> spending all your time and effort reinventing the wheel, I strongly
> suggest taking a survey of what's already out there and then investing
> the time and effort in adopting one of those. I suspect it will (1)
> take less time and effort overall, and depending on which route you
> take, may ALSO (2) pay dividends beyond just generation of Excel
> files.
>
> John Y.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> message: 5
> date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:37:14 -0500
> from: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
> subject: Re: Excel by XML generation
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 4:25 PM Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > There was a discussion on (I think) the RPG list a whole back on this
> topic - for some reason Vern comes to mind as a participant.  Haven't got
> time to look it up I'm afraid but somebody was doing it.
>
> Definitely Vern. Possibly others.
>
> > Basically the approach is to generate a template spreadsheet, mark up
> the underlying XML where needed with placeholders, use templating system
> (in the past I've used CGIDEV2 for this) to modify the template and then
> zip the xml files up again.
>
> Sounds less flexible to me than a full-blown Excel-writing library,
> but if your needs can be served by it, I would think it's a very
> (machine-)efficient approach.
>
> John Y.
>
>
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