SPREADSHEET

For the latest updates to this readme file, see: http://openacs.org/xowiki/spreadsheet

The latest version of the code is available at the development site: http://github.com/tekbasse/spreadsheet

introduction

Spreadsheet provides procedures for building and using tables and spreadsheets in OpenACS. It is an OpenACS package that allows convenient building and interpreting of web-based sheets via tcl in a web page.

Standard spreadsheets are not yet supported.

license

Copyright (c) 2013 Benjamin Brink po box 193, Marylhurst, OR 97036-0193 usa email: [email protected]

Spreadsheet is open source and published under the GNU General Public License, consistent with the OpenACS system: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html A local copy is available at spreadsheet/LICENSE.html

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

features

Integrates well with Q-Forms or any web-based form processing.

Can manipulate Tcl list of lists for easy generation of reports.

There are procedures for importing, rotating, and exporting tables in various formats, including changing Tcl lists to arrays and lists to scalar variables.

Simple Table API is for tables represented as text, where each line is a row, and each cell is separated by a common or specified delimiter.

TIPS "Table Integrated Publishing System" API is a database paradigm used extensively for developing data models in flux and importing or converting databases from one format to another. It was first developed in the 1990's.

Simple Table API

One key feature is Simple Table's ability to guess at most likely common field and end-of-line delimiters based on a statistical analysis of text.

TIPS API

TIPS API is based on the flexibility of spreadsheets, where:

• There is no difference between a cell with null or empty string value.

• There are only 3 "formula" types, numeric, text and vc1k (varchar(1025)).

• Any type can have an empty value.

• A vc1k declared column can be referenced by first or most recent, or all cases of search-string. Foreign Keys are not constrained.

• A missing key returns an empty row/cell. In essence code level errors are avoided.

• Data updates can be by row or cell or column.

• Unreferenced columns are ignored.

• All columns are assumed if none referenced.

• Rows and columns are referenced by internal row_id and field_id (column) or field/column "label".

• Tables can be imported via Simple Table's TCL representation of a table in list of lists format, where the first row contains column labels.

Revisioning is trackable per cell and timestamp, for implementing an "undo" or revisioning capability.