Till Schneidereit wrote: > Hi Umesh, > > get ready for a _huge_ project ;) I guess the best starting point > would be the Office import filters of OpenOffice.org and maybe their > swf export, too (though I don't know about the last one's quality). > Using those you'd have to publish your product under the lgpl, > though, which might or might not be what you want.
I second that. It'd be a sizable undertaking indeed. Especially if you're planning to support all of the common Microsoft Office binary formats with support for more than just the basic feature sets. How do I know this? I've got a secret. For Flash Player 8, some server-side work's probably necessary since the default file formats are binary and thus not directly importable. But if Flash Player 9's the target, it's absolutely doable. Here's why: Late last year, I started writing a de novo Actionscript 3.0 parser for importing Excel spreadsheets (.xls files) using the publicly available file format specifications with great success. After about 40 hours or so of effort, I have already managed to parse an Office 2004 XLS file in its entirety down to individual records and have can export both text and numeric cell data to an array suitable for display in a DataGrid. Now before anyone gets too excited, I can only read in XLS files for the time being and support for legacy XLS formats is still rather sketchy. Also, I currently do not have write support for generating XLS files, though there isn't any technical impediment to doing this aside from time. None of the other features (e.g. fonts, formulas, charting, pivot tables and all the other cool functionality that you might be thinking of) are currently supported, although adding support is mainly a function of writing parsers for the relevant records and a means of adapting the data for use in Actionscript 3.0. More recently, my friend Darron Schall (of FlashVNC and FC64 fame) had ported my code to Beta 2 (as I haven't had time to work on it since the Alpha 1 release of Flex 2.0) and shown a live version of it at his Actionscript 3.0 presentation at Flash in the Can. In the longer term, I am looking at releasing the source under an open-source license (probably one of the GNU ones, though I'm quite open to other suggestions including commercial or dual licensing). I would love to see this grow into a community effort to fully support a large range of binary formats in Actionscript 3.0. However, given the size and scope of implementation full support for the common Microsoft Office file formats, I also have some doubts whether this is possible outside either some sort of dual licensing model to support development from licensing for commercial and/or sponsorship or code contributions from corporate stakeholders. What does everyone else here think? I'd love to know. I have an old demo here, but unfortunately it requires the Alpha 1 Flash Player 8.5 and will not work correctly with the current Flash Player 9 (formerly 8.5). I'll probably have an updated version there in the next few days, but for now you'll need the old player: http://dev.psalterego.com/biff/ExcelParser.swf For reference, you can learn more about the XLS and other Microsoft Office binary format specifications at these sites: http://chicago.sourceforge.net/devel/docs/excel/ http://sc.openoffice.org/excelfileformat.pdf http://www.zuhl.com/~mikez/Info/ For Darron's presentation notes see: http://www.darronschall.com/weblog/archives/000226.cfm Jim _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
