Work with Excel files in web applications like Seaside

Question

I read about the sea and how to sound, but I do not see an easy way to process data files, mainly importing Excel. Of course, csv files would be more straightforward, but are there any ways to import various Excel formats (xls, xlsx) without writing your own file analysis procedures?

I heard that having to open Excel files would be a good reason to choose a Windows-based system like .NET, what do you guys think?

Answer 1

There are various Smalltalk implementations that support Seaside and have excellent integration with the Windows platform: Dolphin Smalltalk , VA Smalltalk, and Cincom Smalltalk . I guess you can call Excel with any of them.

There are various command line tools that you could call to convert the XLS file to something you can easily analyze (for example, CSV).

However, I think that the most elegant solution (also from the point of view of the end user) is Magic / Replace .

Answer 2

Just the answer to the second part of your question: no, this is not a reason. You definitely do not want to run Office as server processes (I have never tried OpenOffice, but this should work a little better). It is not stable and there are license issues you should be aware of.

Answer 3

I was working on a Seaside application that read and wrote Excel worksheets on Linux. Here is what I did ...

• First, my OpenOffice worked in the background and converted all office files to the OpenDocument format,
• and then I imported it into Squeak using some Takashi Yamamiya code . Warning: by the time I used it, exceptional import and export did not work at all, it took me noon and a bit of hacking to achieve this, but then everything went well (Nico, why not, you change the changes back online ? Well, you see ... uh, I forgot. And now they are somewhere well hidden on my disk, and I don’t feel like looking.)

What is it. It wasn't too slow, just make sure OOo is constantly running in the background.