RE: DO NOT REPLY [Bug 35125] - implementing autofilter support

[Amol Deshmukh <ad...@hobsons-us.com>]

Disclaimer:
Personal comments, not representative of any group etc. :)

Reply inline...


> -----Original Message-----

<snip/> <snip/> <snip/>

> ------- Additional Comments From mail@a-engel.de  2005-06-24 
> 14:12 -------
> it seems to me that 
> a) there is nobody able to answer my question about further 
> documentation of
> reserved fields (really!?)
> b) the information i was asking for is pretty obviously 
> documented and i'm just
> too dumb to find/read it
> c) there is nobody willing to provide a helping hand for 
> poi-dev beginners.


Won't/can't comment on a. and b., but I can 
definitely say from personal experience that c. is
not true in general. I have been and still consider
myself a poi-dev beginner, and I have often got 
help from other devs on/off this list :)



> 
> either of the above speculations prevents me from 
> contributing further.
> maybe i should have asked for doing something like updaeting the web
> pages/documentation or stuff like that ... but that would 
> have needed a lot more
> conversation.


IMHO, There is not one 'right' place to start. If your
contribution works and is useful, you have started at
the right place.


In absence of more intelligent responses... :)
My comments on the original questions you posed
on bugzilla -


> "what i want to know is:
> as the description on http://www.zuhl.com/~mikez/Info/ExcelFmt/s59d58.htm
shows
> the dopr structure is not an real record itself (because of the missing
sid)
> but some kind of subrecord. would it be better to implement this stuff in
side
> AutoFilterRecord or is there some arcitecture to support such
subentities?"


When I have such questions, I usually resort to BiffViewer.
If you run BiffViewer, you will see that [OBJ] contains 
SUBRECORD. Ofcourse, if there is nothing to interpret the
SUBRECORD (like your AutoFilterRecord class), it may just 
show up as [UNKNOWNRECORD] in the BiffViewer output. So maybe
your first aim could be to try and implement the AutoFilterRecord
(which apparently you already have) and see if you can
make it work with BiffViewer (at which point you have pretty
much figured it all out :). 

Having a quick look at your code and the BiffViewer
output, I feel that following source files may help you:
  org.apache.poi.hssf.record.SubRecord
  org.apache.poi.hssf.record.CommonObjectDataSubRecord
  org.apache.poi.hssf.record.RecordFactory


> is it better to build a dedicated 
> AutoFilterDoprStruct class?
> or should i just use an data type 
> which is big enough to hold the 10 byte
> (which one should that be?) 
> and to parse attribute informations for dopr on the
> fly with byte handling operations?"


I'm not sure I understand the question entirely
(because I'm myself not very well versed with
excel file format) but is it possible for you to 
just make some assumptions here and proceed with 
an implementation as long as you can get it to work?
Once you have a working version, others can have 
a look at it and see if it needs to be refactored.


Finally, IMHO, it may help if you:
  Attach the code as a CVS patch. It is much easier
to apply patch to a local codebase if someone is
trying out your code than open each file, see 
which package it belongs to and put/import it in
that package in the local codebase.



> kind regards
> andreas


HTH and Regards
~ amol

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