Hi Andi Thank you for your reply. You are right I completely have forgotten about jxls.
> Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? The usecase was to generate an fill in forms, and users after that added some additional content. That's why word documents were chosen instead of pdfs. The data structure was stable and simple (30 fields, text, numbers an dates), but the form layout was dependent of the cooperation partner and the language of the customer of the partner. We ended up with 40 different templates for the same data. Oliver -----Original Message----- From: Andreas Beeker [mailto:andreas.bee...@gmx.de] Sent: Donnerstag, 15. Januar 2015 00:34 To: POI Developers List Subject: Re: [Discussion] Generating MS Word documents based on templates Hi Oliver, > do you think it make sense to start an open source project, which addresses > this requirements? Similar to jxls for Excel, I think this would be also a good approach for Word. (I haven't searched for alternative implementations.) > The most important requirement was, that the end-user itself can easily > create and modify the templates in MS Word without programming skills. Just out of curiosity, what was your use case? I assume this [easily create and modify] is suitable for (one-)table like data structures. But for handling nested structures/lists, user need to have basic knowledge of list processing. As a developer, I would prefer to have something like a scripting language to access my data - preferably with calling custom functions. I have to admit, that I'm a bit allergic to the expression "without programming skills", as this lead to some bad management decisions in my $dayjob. > And if so, are there developers, which are interested in helping us starting > such a project? For POI issues, I'm sure we can help you - preferably for XWPF as the HWPF might need some (much more) work. Apart of POI issues - speaking for myself - I'm not really interested, as I hardly use Word (and programmatically not at all) and there are still so many issues with X/HSLF and X/HSSF I have on my todo list. > Could Apache POI be a place to start such a project as subproject? I think you are better off, creating a top level project first - of course we can link to that project from the project pages. A subproject would probably go to the contrib directory which hasn't got much attention. One thing I don't like about new bigger features in POI is the release stability *), i.e. I often come to the point where I'd like to refactor several methods but instead of removing the methods, I deprecate them and introduce a bunch of others ... Furthermore for a new project, you might like to be flexible and not be bound to a certain library dependency/decision. Best wishes, Andi *) doesn't apply to contrib projects --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@poi.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@poi.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@poi.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@poi.apache.org
