Re: Excel Generation Alternatives

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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