Is it a simple data structure?

Post #22,206 by ben_tilly 12/21/01 7:12:25 AM Reply	Is it a simple data structure? If it is sufficiently simple then you can do this with 2 pages. The first takes whatever and exports it as CSV. (This can be read in Excel.) The second one has a textfield which you cut-and-paste into from Excel and upload back (that comes back as tab-delimited). Cheers, Ben
Post #22,224 by ChrisR 12/21/01 11:48:11 AM Reply	A tree of sorts Nothing particularly difficult about the data structure, but it is a hierarchical tree that has 6 distinct node types that are somewhat cyclic. Although I'm using a relational database to hold the data, it's kind of a pain to manage. A nice OO model would actually be better suited to a solution, but I didn't have that advantage on picking the server platform. That said, I think maybe what you are suggesting might be the route I take. The offline stuff doesn't necessarily have to carry the hierarchy over to the user interface. The reason for taking it offline have more to do with data entry than it does with analysis. I could collapse the tree into a flat structure that would allow the data entry to take place offline, but keep the tree intact on the web server. Have to give it some thought though on what features I want to shuck on the offline version.
Post #22,255 by JayMehaffey 12/21/01 8:50:36 PM Reply	We do pretty much the same thing The application I work on does pretty much the same thing right now. We actually build an .xls file on the server, and then put a link so they can download the file. To upload the file we have a macro in the spreadsheet that picks up the data fields we need back, formats them nicely and copies them to the clipboard. Then the user can past them into a text box on the server. Jay
Post #22,434 by Arkadiy 12/26/01 11:58:59 AM Reply	OUCH!!!!
Post #22,473 by CRConrad 12/27/01 9:13:16 AM Reply	Done that too, in PL/SQL. Only, IIUC it was... ...actually a CSV-format file -- but by giving it the .XLS file-name extension, you get Windows/Explorer/Internet Explorer to have Excel open it by default, and then you let that figure out the actual format of the file. Can't be sure, though; it could be that we used some special export-to-Excel package that built a real actual Excel file... I dunno, it was a while ago, and I only copied-and-modified a colleague's code. Oh, and we only built the file if they really tried to download it. The URL pointed to a PL/SQL procedure that, when they clicked the URL / invoked the procedure, built a file for them. IIRC. Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Knows Fucking Everything

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