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foglcz edited this page Apr 23, 2013 · 21 revisions

Welcome to XSLT excel engine! Here we'll try to showcase how to use it & mainly, how to work with the entire system.

We will present know-how we gathered, alongside with the best practices we employ while working with the engine.

Ground rules

In order to understand each other, let's make some ground rules regarding naming things. Following is stuff, which you should know in order to read this guide correctly:

  • .xslx files are just one big nasty ZIP files.
  • within those ZIP files, there are loosely-coupled .xml files. These are called "Office Open XML format"
  • Seriously, if you can use something like Crystal reports go ahead and use that.

In the entire documentation, we will be assuming that you are using this repository for generating some-kind-of-a-report from some-kind-of-an-erp system. That's precisely what we're doing.

Requirements

The engine is tested on, Saxon XSLT processor. At the version 1.0 we cannot guarantee that it will work in other processors, altough any xslt 2.0 processor should work just fine.

We are TOTALLY happy if you issue a pull-request with fixes, should there be need for some.

Out of the list of tools you will need:

The structure

We will present the entire workflow from the start to the end, as we currently work whenever preparing new XLSX export. Catch a ride with us!

  1. Preparing excel files
  2. Preparing the first output
  3. Putting plain data into excel sheet
  4. Appending images
  5. Creating multiple worksheets
  6. Printer settings
  7. Macro-enabled workbooks
  8. Under the hood
  9. Engine parameters documentation
  10. Best practice for writing Excel XML
  11. Authors, license, contributing