duffymo
Jun 10th, 2008, 09:52 AM
It's common where I work for business customers to implement functionality using Microsoft Excel. The good news is that they get what they need in a timely way; the bad news is that mission critical software lives on an individual's hard drive without backup, auditing, etc. If the data manipulated in the spreadsheet comes from a database feed, there might be more problems caused by calculations that aren't fed back to the system of origin.
So I was thinking that Spring might offer a nice way out of the morass with its JExcelView. A user can access information from the browser by making a request to Spring and getting the response back in the browser as JExcelView. They can then do whatever calculations or manipulations they wish, without having to keep the spreadsheet on their desktop. Users will all get the same Excel from a central place. It's even possible to secure and audit the whole thing with Spring Security.
The only problem I have is the file upload problem. If an individual does some calculations or somehow modifies the spreadsheet, how do they get it back to the server easily? I know about file upload, but whenever I've done that it requires the user to select a file from their hard drive or desktop. How can I do a file upload of the current contents of the browser, without having to save the Excel file to disk? Is it simply a POST back to the server? Does the server then have to recreate the Excel spreadsheet prior to saving it?
I'll apologize in advance for the ignorant questions. A seamless browser-based solution to this problem would be invaluable. Thanks.
So I was thinking that Spring might offer a nice way out of the morass with its JExcelView. A user can access information from the browser by making a request to Spring and getting the response back in the browser as JExcelView. They can then do whatever calculations or manipulations they wish, without having to keep the spreadsheet on their desktop. Users will all get the same Excel from a central place. It's even possible to secure and audit the whole thing with Spring Security.
The only problem I have is the file upload problem. If an individual does some calculations or somehow modifies the spreadsheet, how do they get it back to the server easily? I know about file upload, but whenever I've done that it requires the user to select a file from their hard drive or desktop. How can I do a file upload of the current contents of the browser, without having to save the Excel file to disk? Is it simply a POST back to the server? Does the server then have to recreate the Excel spreadsheet prior to saving it?
I'll apologize in advance for the ignorant questions. A seamless browser-based solution to this problem would be invaluable. Thanks.