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List:       poi-user
Subject:    Re: HSSF - Generating large spreadsheets in streaming manner?
From:       "Andrew C. Oliver" <acoliver () apache ! org>
Date:       2006-03-10 21:11:25
Message-ID: 4411EB7D.9040400 () apache ! org
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not yet.  Demand for the cocoon serializer hasn't been very high so it 
is mostly deprecated (unless there is some massive uptake of support for 
it).

Okay its time for my yearly rant on this subject (not aimed at you...you 
just reminded me I hadn't done it this year):

I'm always a little curious about this.  XLS is a HORRIBLE format (which 
is why I started POI, I wanted to do something difficult).  It is a 
HORRIBLY inefficient format and WAS NOT DESIGNED to stream.  Yet people 
generate massive sheets in it.  My pensiveness is that no human is 
likely to read such a large sheet or be able to do anything patricularly 
useful with it.  So who are these sheets for?  Often it turns out they 
are some kind of data transfer, which is frankly BAFFLING.  Why? 
Because I could do the same transfer with like 1/10th of the storage, 
bandwidth, CPU, etc in a more well-thought out (or at least lightweight) 
format.  Yet I saw a spreadsheet today that was 100mb.  The power of 
Excel is that it can style the data and use some formulas.  This is good 
for what is to me a summary report and not RAW 100m or gigs of data.. 
Of course this comes from someone who knows how to hack the underlying 
binary structures but barely knows how to run the Excel GUI.   :-)

We now return you to your previously scheduled mail list activity.

-Andy

PS.  I wish the open office GUI wasn't so crappy, sluggish and 
well...cruddy looking and printed nicely.  Their file formats make so 
much more sense (and with compression they're reasonably efficient) and 
the brilliance of text is that it works nicely with revision control and 
revision control tags.

PPS.  I also wish the open office developers would either learn C++, 
convert all of their code to C and/or port open office to a language 
they know how to write better structured code in.

Brule, Jon wrote:
> Is it possible to generate a very large spreadsheet (e.g. several
> thousand rows) in a low-memory, streaming manner? I am looking for a
> corollary to the event model used to parse large spreadsheets.
> 
> If not, I assume that the Cocoon serializer, which I understand uses
> HSSF, would not operate in a streaming manner either...
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Regards,
> Jon
> _________________
> Jon R. Brule
> Paramount Computing Associates
> 
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