One disadvantage I see is that its not transactional. Transactions allow you to group a set of changes to the datasource that either must all succeed or all must fail. Without transactions, data integrity can be corrupted. I don't know how you are representing your data so I don't know if this is an issue. With POI you would have to build this capability yourself and it isn't trivial whereas if you used a database it may already be there. HSQLDB is an embeddable open source java based database. I have no idea if it supports transactions though. In my experience, the data used by the application is too "raw" for the end user. I would recommend using a database for the datasource and using POI for Excel import/export.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dimitri Pissarenko" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 10:51 PM Subject: Using Excel as a persistence mechanism Hello! I am workng on an open-source process modelling system demetrix - http://demetrix.sourceforge.net/resources/2004_01_05_demetrix_0_0_1/index.html At the moment, demetrix stores all the data of a process chain in Excel files, which are written and read using POI/HSSF. The advantage of Excel is obvious: the user can edit the data manually and can always view them -> higher transparency of the application. I am curious about what costs this solution might result in (apart from the fact that Excel is probably not suitable for storing large amounts of data). Any ideas? TIA dap --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
