Re: template questions, and more....

[Andrew C. Oliver]

Steve wrote:

I've been doing some development with 1.5.1. My code will be part of
a production release on about March 20. Can I safely use a later release, with more features?

I would reasonably expect you to be able to. I would take a few samples of your expected inputs and write some junit tests around them to make sure if I were you.

Is there a list of new features/capabilities in each release subsequent to 1.5.1?

it is not comprehensive but here: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/changes.html.

I want to use the POI API to read in Excel "templates" and modify them,
and write out the results to a new xls file. I understand the concepts.

In doing this, it would be helpful to be able to use "named cells" in the
Excel template, and then be able to use the POI API to search for a
particular "name", to locate the row and column number of the cell
that I want to modify. Is this capability part of a future release?

The only thing is that the naming code needs to be (still or did someone do this yet?) refactored. Again, unit tests with expected inputs and outputs is the best approach to judgement as to whether this is at least ready enough for your needs.

I can "concoct" a sloppy solution, by putting special "tag" values in
the template, and then search for them, but a nice API for this would
be helpful.

yes. I suspect either solution will work. If it were me, I'd go for the latter (named range) and contribute fixes and bug reports for things that didn't work. I prefer working close to the head of most projects as I feel it is less risky than waiting and having to integrate later. Late adoption has its own inherent risks and costs.

In 1.5.1, I don't see how I can add/inset an existing populated HSSFSheet object
to an existing HSSFWorkbook. This would be helpful. I may want to
put together a HSSFWorksheet by adding several HSSFSheet objects
that I "get" from several different templates (HSSFWorkbooks).

Yeah, I think you can do this in the nightly builds. Shawn I think contributed this and can answer with more authoratively.

-Andy

THANKS,
Steve

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