Re: XML File Format

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 12:41:09PM +0000, David Gilbert wrote:
> http://www.jrefinery.com/jworkbook

Lovely !  We'll need to add a page to the gnumeric web pages listing
related projects.  I've just been told that there is an R plugin
also.  Christian could you have a look ?

> (1)  I read somewhere that there is now a DTD for the XML format, but I
> couldn't find it in the version 0.74 download...any pointers?
No DTD is available (although a big chunk of it is written up in
plugins/xml_sax.  What was added was a schema.  Marc Johnson of the
POI project contributed an xml schema that went in for version
0.71.

> (2)  Is there any other info on the XML format that might be useful?  I know
> the source code is there, but I'm not a C programmer so that's a slow option
> for me.
The xml_sax plugin has a fairly clear list of the state tree as does
the schema.

> (3)  I want my Java code to be able to write spreadsheet files that can be
> read in Excel.  I can either write to the native format OR develop an Excel
> add-in that can read the Gnumeric format directly.  Is anyone aware of any
> work that has been done on the latter option?
Talk about having the tail wag the dog !  That is very funny.  No I
have information about writing new import filters for XL.  I think
your best bets are probably
1) wait for me to enable the Gnumeric CORBA bindings for load/save
(The first things that would be enabled)
2) Have a look at the perl module that cat write xls files.

> (4)  So far, Gnumeric has seemed pretty resilient when reading my Java
> generated XML files which are potentially not in the correct format.  Any
> "gotchas" that I should particularly watch out for?

None that I know of, but if you find anything please tell us.
Exporting to XL is a pain, because it tends to crash when hit with
unexpected, or even slightly different content.  I'd like to avoid
that in Gnumeric, so if you can screw it up, we should patch it.

Good Luck
    Jody