Re: [ubl-dev] Creating UBL instances directly from spreadsheet

[Chin Chee-Kai <cheekai@softml.net>]

Thanks for the note, Ken.  Glad to hear that XSLT users are  also supported.

I'd like to elaborate just a little, but I need to be careful because I 
don't wish to end up  rolling the topic into another Excel vs ODF forum, 
but more to focus on Designing and Generating  UBL instances from 
Spreadsheets.

Nothing I've said is something fundamentally new, or cannot be done by 
one or other software.  The only things I tried to work on are 
combination of simple things like visually contrasting colored entries, 
locked cells to prevent accidental wrong entries, simple demarcation of 
comment blocks for both human-help-text and XML generation XPaths, and 
so on.  The agent that smartly looks at all these details and dishes out 
a nice plate of UBL instance would be the UBLish open software.

For example, UBLish can see colors, and would process only the 
light-yellow and light-blue cells.  This means user could easily  see 
and manage which cell values to produce, and which not.  This is almost 
a WYSIWYG sort of "printing" for XML-Instance generation.

In the whole process, my purpose was to minimize additional things to 
learn or do in order to just get the output instance "right".  One could 
easily use the current version of UBLish v2.0.alpha to convert Excel 
into XML-Spreadsheet format (with the <Row>s and <Column>s) and then 
apply suitable XSLT to convert into target UBL instance format.  But 
that still isn't good enough.

I've done away with the need for XSLT, since I believe the use of 
modified XPaths right at the cells where the values are stored behave 
like  laser beams pinpointing exactly where the value should be 
transformed.  So it almost looks like a "Visual XSLT" of sort, but 
without the need for a simple user to learn about XSLT.  But I think I 
haven't scored 100% here either, because of the use of modified XPath 
expression in the comment.  I hope this is the least delta information 
needed for the user to supply and for UBLish to correctly produce the 
desired instance.


regards,
Chin Chee-Kai
-------------------------------
Some URLs again:
Sample Invoice (Excel) for :
http://ublish.sourceforge.net/XML-Instance/UBL-INV-20080901-120353-ABX2.xls

Sample Generated XML-Instance (UBL v2.0):
http://ublish.sourceforge.net/XML-Instance/UBL-INV-20080901-120353-ABX2.xml
-------------------------------




G. Ken Holman wrote:
> At 2008-09-29 15:01 +0800, Chin Chee-Kai wrote:
>> Does anyone use Excel spreadsheet for data entry and then generate 
>> UBL instances directly from the spreadsheet?
>
> At the Manhattan UBL face-to-face in January I demonstrated using 
> OpenOffice spreadsheet data entry to a UBL 2.0 instance, but that 
> wouldn't port to Excel because Excel doesn't support the embedding of 
> XSLT stylesheets.