Re: MVC framework for Excel?

Andrew,

While this isn’t a “java based solution” per say, I have generated XLS files with an excellent perl module http://search.cpan.org/dist/Spreadsheet-WriteExcel/lib/Spreadsheet/WriteExcel.pm <http://search.cpan.org/dist/Spreadsheet-WriteExcel/lib/Spreadsheet/WriteExcel.pm>

It, from what I can tell, is generating the XML that excel reads behind the scenes and what you get here is the ability to essentially do anything programmatically that excel can do, and it isn’t too complicated.  The complication for you would be the fact that this is in perl. 

We have a web application that shells out to a perl script to accomplish this, and this perl functionality happens to manage the generation of several report types already so it didn’t feel like a “out of bounds” solution at the time.   It happens asynchronously, and is essentially a report generation module that can be run on the same or different servers independently of the web application. 

Hope this helps,
Steven

> On Feb 15, 2016, at 4:26 PM, Jesse Karr <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hey Andrew,
> 
> The first thought I had was "why does the executive not just hire a skilled administrative assistant to prepare the reports for him?"
> 
> Jesse
> 
> 
> On Monday, February 15, 2016, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> There has got to be something around to assist with this but it does not seem to be easily Googled, at least by me, so any insight would be appreciated. 
> 
> We provide an ever increasing number of data feeds for assorted uses. Commonly they are to be consumed using Excel. For simplicity we prefer to provide the feed as CSV which makes the generation pretty straight forward. However there is a growing trend to provide "executive" reporting in Excel, which is another way of indicating a consumer that does not have time (or does not know how) to use Excel to extract the desired results. 
> 
> We have produced Excel using JExcel API/Apache POI which adds a lot of complexity to the data feed code, so I am not a fan of this in a single step. We are now looking at taking a skeleton spreadsheet, which may include pie charts, etc., and loading the data section of it so the formatting is not being generated by code. 
> 
> I think we should go all the way and divorce the data feed (model) from Excel (view) through a mapping (controller) to separate the concerns. 
> 
> Is there some framework available that supports this already? Is this even a reasonable approach? Any suggestions greatly appreciated. 
> 
> This is in a Groovy and Grails environment if that has any bearing on the topic. 
> 
> Thanks! 
> 
> 
> Andrew Goodspeed
> "How *reliable* [is he]? How shallow is the ocean? How cold is the sun?" -Douglas Adams (Arthur Dent)
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