Fair comment. What would be a good demonstration of feasibility? I'm perfectly willing to extract say the formula stuff or any other area not yet implemented in HSSF and put it in a more usable form.
Chris -----Original Message----- From: Andrew C. Oliver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 23:34 To: POI Development Subject: Re: Fw: Hopefully useful code donation Its up to any contributer or committer who wants to look at it. I've gotten my fill of "Come look at my code and figure out what it does and see if it has anything useful" -- So far I've failed usually to figure out what their code did and often WHERE it is. I'm more interested in code donations that come along with smart people than I am code for us to maintain. Thats just my opinion. Not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, its just a lot of work for us to do with no proof of feasibility. In this case proof of infeasibility (unavailability of the author). On Mon, 2002-04-22 at 10:09, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Chris Tregenza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 3:16 PM > Subject: Hopefully useful code donation > > > > Hello all, > > > > I've have written an Excel file reader in Java as part of developing a > > product for the company I work for. This was started a couple of years ago > > before the HSSF project existed otherwise I would of saved myself an awful > > lot of work. After some discussion I have persuaded the company (who > > wishes to remain nameless due to the market we operate in) to release this > > code to the HSSF. > > > > What the code does is read Excel 97 files and makes the data available via > > a variety of classes. As this has been done to fulfil our needs it only > > handles data types that are important to our product. Critically (I > > believe) to the HSSF is that we fully support formulas* and named ranges. > > > > I don't imagine that my code (which is pretty rough** in places) can be > > dropped into the HSSF but I hope that it useful as either a) something > > that be quickly cannibalised and used in HSSF until something better gets > > written or b) as a reference implementation to help with some of the > > undocumented nasties floating around in the Excel. > > > > Clearly it isn't suitable for submitting to the POI CVS so I propose to > > put the code up on a web site so that others on this list can use it as > > required. > > > > Our companies plan is not to developed our code any further and when HSSF > > has all the functionality we need, we will replace our code with HSSF. > > Because of deadlines etc I'm not going to be able work on the HSSF code > > for a while but hopefully I will have useful advice to offer in the > > meantime. > > > > Chris Tregenza > > > > > > *By this I mean it reads the Excel ptgs and produces a human readable > > string identical to that displayed in Excel. It doesn't do any sort of > > calculations. > > > > ** This is an understatement. When I started writing this code I had only > > a few months experience of Java and no idea about the Excel file format. > > > -- http://www.superlinksoftware.com http://jakarta.apache.org/poi - port of Excel/Word/OLE 2 Compound Document format to java http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/bugParade/bugs/4487555.html - fix java generics! The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. -Ambassador Kosh
