OpenDocument spreadsheet (.ods) reader

[Loriel]

Originally Posted by Inverness

Source: The source of this feature request is this wiki article explaining its extensive use in Dragon Age: Origins by BioWare. Most of the previous paragraph was quoted from the article: http://social.bioware.com/wiki/datoolset/index.php/2DA

"Before they can be used by the toolset or the game, 2DAs must be converted from Excel files into a more efficient form."

Integrating a spreadsheet processor into Graal that understands macros and formula seems a bit overkill, at least convert it to a CSV text file or something before uploading. :I

[WhiteDragon]

Originally Posted by Loriel

"Before they can be used by the toolset or the game, 2DAs must be converted from Excel files into a more efficient form."

Integrating a spreadsheet processor into Graal that understands macros and formula seems a bit overkill, at least convert it to a CSV text file or something before uploading. :I

This is what I told Inverness, but he seemed to think CSV wasn't powerful enough.

[Loriel]

Originally Posted by WhiteDragon

This is what I told Inverness, but he seemed to think CSV wasn't powerful enough.

He is supposed to do his fancy formula magic in Excel or whatever, then just convert it to a CSV to feed it to the server. Or, hell, write a Excel macro that spits out a gs2 array definition.

What I was trying to get at is that as I understand it, this Dragon Age thing does not have Excel inside the actual engine either.

[Twinny]

Originally Posted by Loriel

He is supposed to do his fancy formula magic in Excel or whatever, then just convert it to a CSV to feed it to the server. Or, hell, write a Excel macro that spits out a gs2 array definition.

What I was trying to get at is that as I understand it, this Dragon Age thing does not have Excel inside the actual engine either.

This is what I thought when I read,

PHP Code:

2DAs must be converted from Excel files into a more efficient form. 


[Inverness]

Originally Posted by Loriel

"Before they can be used by the toolset or the game, 2DAs must be converted from Excel files into a more efficient form."

Integrating a spreadsheet processor into Graal that understands macros and formula seems a bit overkill, at least convert it to a CSV text file or something before uploading. :I

No, Graal would only read the text values of the cells. You can get cell values--which are entered manually or results of formulas--by parsing the XML, formulas used to produce the values are stored elsewhere and are ignored. Everything else is only for the benefit of the person editing the spreadsheet.

Originally Posted by WhiteDragon

This is what I told Inverness, but he seemed to think CSV wasn't powerful enough.

Things like comments, formulas, and color coding would need to be preserved, that is the whole point. You can't do that with CSV. Having to produce a new CSV file every time you edit the spreadsheet seems troublesome to me, it would just save a lot of time for a function to be able to read the spreadsheet file and covert it into a format usable for scripting.

Originally Posted by coreys

I'm thinking that Inverness would find more ideal to be able to just edit the OpenDocument spreadsheet and upload it to have changes take effect, instead of having to run some macro every time and update an array in a script somewhere.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by coreys

I'm not sure that, in the scope of Graal, that doing all this is completely worth while, though...unless you're planning some huge server on the scale of Dragon Age lol

Considering how relatively easy it is to open a ZIP file and parse some XML it is not time-consuming to implement.