RE: [ubl-dev] Simple description of XML-Spreadsheet format

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Chin,

Actually the reverse process is a little more involved.

The Excel format is actually in XML these days - and it is relatively
simple <cell> based.

BUT - you have to "know" where the cell content is that you want as
there is a lot of other "fluff" in the raw Excel file.

Not impossible though to build XSLT that will run generically against an
Excel XML format and extract a default set of content from it. 
Especially if you pass in parameters to the XSLT of the cell offsets to
pull data from...or have it pick up headers from the first row of cells.

A small project for those inclined to experiment!?!

Thanks, DW 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ubl-dev] Simple description of XML-Spreadsheet format
From: Chin Chee-Kai <cheekai@softml.net>
Date: Thu, September 18, 2008 10:28 pm
To: "David RR Webber (XML)" <david@drrw.info>
Cc: UBL-Dev <ubl-dev@lists.oasis-open.org>, "G. Ken Holman"
<gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>

Thanks for your counter-suggestion, David. You have a good point about 
making a perfect spreadsheet starting from a given XML file. It might 
be a bit clumsy with attribute values storing generic content, but it 
works nevertheless with sufficiently tame examples.

What I'd like to ask is if you start first with populating spreadsheet 
content, such as the small table below, and then saving it in "Other - 
XML Format" under Excel. (I hope the table shows up properly in plain 
text.)

this that UBL NAME NDR
123 a Address R 1
444 b Postcode r 2
222 c Line RR 3


I got the message "Cannot save as there is no XML mapping". It would 
be tedious to work out a mapping for each sheet. In Excel-speak, 
XML-Spreadsheet is just providing a default mapping from which applying 
other XML transformation tools would get you the exact format you want.


Regards,
Chin Chee-Kai



David RR Webber (XML) wrote:
> You may be making this way too complex.
>
> <thisWorks>
> <row this="123" that="ABC" other="2008/04/03"/>
> <row this="124" that="ABCD" other="2008/04/07"/>
> <row this="129" that="ABCE" other="2008/04/08"/>
> <row this="132" that="ABCF" other="2008/04/09"/>
> </thisWorks>
>
> save this to XML - open in Excel. Will make perfect spreadsheet.
>
> I've used this very successfully outputting from XSLT and in combination
> with CAM templates.
>
> Thanks, DW
>