FYI. I've just created a new project GPL at source forge. www.sf.net/projects/republic
It's aim is to help organisations locked-in to proprietary software (mainly those CRM/ERP types) to extract data from their computer reports and out into the open world of OASIS standard spreadsheets (ie OpenOffice). This project has been sponsored to some degree by a Progress-4GL user to help them extract data from MFG-Pro reports. Interesting bits in writing it were (for the developers amongst you): - XSL for translating my XML to Open Office was p*ss easy although I'm currently stuck on date fields, I've got currency and string fields translated. The tricky bit was re-zipping until SUN helped with an example. - There is room for a generic 'report xml' format that can be a middle ground to OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, text, CSV, PS, etc. This may be out there as I'm sure & hope someone will point out, I just haven't found it yet. I'm thinking of breaking the command line stuff into two distinct phases to make it more useful to other projects: 1) Parse to report.xml. 2) Translate report.xml to OpenOffice. This enables more easy translation to other formats with application of different XSL. These are random ramblings which may be applicable to a few of you in middle-to-corporate size organisations. It's the sort of application that really appeals to accountants and middle-management ie spreadsheet lovers. Ten rabbit stamps if you can work out why it's called 'republic'... ATB Stu -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
