It sounds like we have all invented our own little wheels so just to add to the pile .. we also have come up with our own internal packages which take a word template, manipulate the heck out of it and put it back together to produce a newly generated document using web input for text and graphical and data input from the database. I think it would be great to have a public framework around this - everyone would benefit from new functionality.
I would help in development of this new package... On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Freivogel Oliver <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Andi > > Thank you for your reply. You are right I completely have forgotten about > jxls. > > > Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? > > The usecase was to generate an fill in forms, and users after that added > some additional content. That's why word documents were chosen instead of > pdfs. The data structure was stable and simple (30 fields, text, numbers > an dates), but the form layout was dependent of the cooperation partner > and the language of the customer of the partner. We ended up with 40 > different templates for the same data. > > Oliver > > -----Original Message----- > From: Andreas Beeker [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Donnerstag, 15. Januar 2015 00:34 > To: POI Developers List > Subject: Re: [Discussion] Generating MS Word documents based on templates > > Hi Oliver, > > > do you think it make sense to start an open source project, which > addresses this requirements? > Similar to jxls for Excel, I think this would be also a good approach for > Word. > (I haven't searched for alternative implementations.) > > > The most important requirement was, that the end-user itself can easily > create and modify the templates in MS Word without programming skills. > Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? > I assume this [easily create and modify] is suitable for (one-)table like > data structures. > But for handling nested structures/lists, user need to have basic > knowledge of list processing. > As a developer, I would prefer to have something like a scripting language > to access my data - preferably with calling custom functions. > I have to admit, that I'm a bit allergic to the expression "without > programming skills", as this lead to some bad management decisions in my > $dayjob. > > > And if so, are there developers, which are interested in helping us > starting such a project? > For POI issues, I'm sure we can help you - preferably for XWPF as the HWPF > might need some (much more) work. > Apart of POI issues - speaking for myself - I'm not really interested, as > I hardly use Word (and programmatically not at all) and there are still so > many issues with X/HSLF and X/HSSF I have on my todo list. > > > Could Apache POI be a place to start such a project as subproject? > I think you are better off, creating a top level project first - of course > we can link to that project from the project pages. A subproject would > probably go to the contrib directory which hasn't got much attention. > One thing I don't like about new bigger features in POI is the release > stability *), i.e. I often come to the point where I'd like to refactor > several methods but instead of removing the methods, I deprecate them and > introduce a bunch of others ... Furthermore for a new project, you might > like to be flexible and not be bound to a certain library > dependency/decision. > > Best wishes, > Andi > > *) doesn't apply to contrib projects > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional > commands, e-mail: [email protected] > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
