Re: SpreadsheetML

Hi Daniel, Daniel Convissor wrote:

So, I am taking the API of Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and changing it to output SpreadsheetML. SpreadsheetML is an XML format created by our "friends" at Microsoft to represent Excel spreadsheets. http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx My question to y'all is what do you think the package should be named? My thought is "Spreadsheet_SpreadsheetML_Writer." But perhaps it should be "Spreadsheet_ML_Writer" or "XML_SpreadsheetML_Writer" or something else entirely.

Because you're going to provide an answer to the need of generating Excel-compatible content, I suppose that outputing SpreadsheetML could be part of Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer itself. An option could set wether to use the binary or new XML format. Don't you think ? This way people who already use Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer would only need to set an option, and leave the rest of their code as it is. By the way, while you're at it, I must confess that a very bad limitation of Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer is that it needs to load all of the data into memory before rendering. Outputing a database table content as a spreadsheet often tends to be an export-like kind of feature, with thousands of rows. In this regard, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer simply gets unusable. With this XML format I suppose that you could easily implement some sort of buffered streaming, to avoid such memory eating. That would be great IMO. Best regards, -- og