Hi Don,
About 2 monthes ago I was looking for the same type of program. I wanted to
parse hold files and send directly into excel all automatically formatted.
It would be great if IBM could add a feature to the U2 spooler for at least
their report writer ie (List/Sort) routines to send to hold files with a
delimited format.
I solved this by writing a vb.net program that reads a spooled hold file and
then parses the columns. I then used excel automation in the vb.net program
to format columns, autofit columns, format cells etc. This worked well until
I deployed vb.net program on the Unidata windows server and ran across a
number of issues with using excel this way. Microsoft has documented some of
the issues at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q257757
They say "Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support,
Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended,
non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, DCOM, and NT
Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when
run in this environment."
Having gove down this route I found a company called Aspose that has a .net
dll which provides an object model which can be used to format and write
excel files without having excel loaded. Their web site is www.aspose.com
It took me about a week to incorporate their object model into my project
and it has been successful. The only requirement for the hold file is that
each column heading must end in a (.) period so that the parser knows where
a column ends.
The .net program gets executed from a unibasic program and then if the user
wants to open the .xls file after parsing and formatting takes place the
networked .xls file is automatically opened by Excel on the client computer.
My next enhancement to the vb.net program will be to write a front end which
will provide a text import wizard similiar to the one that Excel uses for
special reports.
Regards,
Bob Modrich
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