Hi All,
I've been working on the ODS importer for the Tabular package
(http://ss3.gemtalksystems.com/ss/Tabular.html) and wanted to offer the
opportunity for feedback before updating the code as it is likely to
affect existing users.
While the class structure of Tabular is designed to support multiple
formats in theory, in practice the existing implementation is quite XLSX
specific.
I think that trying to extend the core Tabular classes to be a superset
of all the functionality from the various formats (XLSX, ODS, etc.) will
not be practical - I don't have a good enough understanding of all the
formats to implement it in the first place, and certainly not to resolve
conflicting attributes in any sensible way.
The approach I've taken is to make the existing classes, which were
intended to be format independent, abstract and create format specific
subclasses, i.e. the existing TabularCell and TabularStyle become:
TabularCell
TabularXLSXCell
TabularODSCell
TabularStyle
TabularXLSXStyle
TabularODSStyle
The modified code runs the existing test suite successfully without any
modifications.
I welcome any comments, suggestions, etc.
Also, Tabular currently loads PharoExtras/XMLWriter and
PharoExtras/XMLParser as dependencies. I've been using XMLSupport,
which I thought I remembered reading was a replacement for XMLWriter and
XMLParser, but now I can't find the reference. Is one generally
preferred over the other?
Thanks very much,
Alistair
