Re: RPG and Excel

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Garvey <tgarvey@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We have a Windows application that reads the data from an Excel table and
takes over a client access session and types the data into the screen.
Saves a lot of typing.
This application requires the Table setup so I have no other options.

Interesting. You definitely have other options, if you're willing to
take a step (or three) back. We know that your data resides on the i,
because otherwise you wouldn't be asking for an RPG solution. It
feels very roundabout to take the data from the i, package it up, open
it in Windows, only to have a Windows app drive an interactive session
on the i.

Obviously, there must be *some* way to bypass Windows and just do the
whole thing on the i. But, it's certainly possible that the
green-screen app being driven by the table is doing lots of
complicated things, and it's easier to continue letting it do the
heavy lifting.

But that still leaves room to move some other processing to the
Windows machine. For example, if you create a CSV on the i, you have
probably dozens of options for scripting things on Windows to perform
the transformation from CSV to table-within-Excel (perhaps the most
straightforward being VBA or VBScript).

Make no mistake, I'm still a fan of generating the Excel file directly
on the i, and I think it's almost stupidly easy with Python and
XlsxWriter.

John Y.