On Sun, 10 Jul 2011, Jon Svede wrote:
I am thinking about extending the ExcelAnt framework to be able to create workbooks from various data sources. Some of the people I have worked who use Excel heavily often times have to go through several steps to extract data from databases and CSV files before then can build their workbooks. Usually it is aggregating data from many sources into a single workbook. This can be a time consuming task simply due to the number files or databases with which they have to interact.
A lot of these aren't problems I personally face, but I suspect quite a lot of users (and potential users!) do, so if you're happy to work on it then I don't see why we shouldn't have it!
In terms of the CSV and SQL bits, it's possible that we'd be better off looking at somethingl like Apache Cocooon to do the transformations for these. It's quite likely that we'd need to do a few tweaks to the POI Excel output types (not sure how much love they've had lately), but that could deliver a wide range of inputs very easily. The excel ant step could then just be configuring up a cocoon pipeline based on the options given in ant, rather than having to do loads of other coding too!
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