I'm looking for some info on how to create a .vsdx file in Java without any commercial libraries. According to other questions it seems to be pretty tough.
As a source we have a different, probably unknown file format called .epml that contains graphical information of EPCs which we should be able to convert to a .xml file. As far as I understand the .vsdx format so far, that's one of many files in the unzipped .vsdx required. I'd be glad if anyone could tell me about my options how to implement/create all the other files.
EDIT: The goal here is to be able to convert the graphic information of the .epml file so Visio is able to read & display it as in the source. Therefore, it doesn't have to be a .vsdx file if there are other possible options.
Thanks!
EPML is a not an unknown format, it is an interchange format for EPC tools. Just try to google it :)
I would suggest you convert your .epml files to .svg (there are free open source converters available, like epml2svg). Visio can read and show .svg files. Means - writing code does not seem to be required to achieve your goal (to convert .epml files to something Visio can show). AFAR there is online version of the tool as well - you upload EPML file, get back SVG, and just open it in Visio - that's it.
Side note - there are companies, like bpm-x for example, specializing in BPM tool-to-tool diagram conversion. Maybe they already have a solution for your original tool.
The .VSDX file is "office xml" format, that is also open and documented. But it's pretty tough to generate file from scratch, you are right. So in principle you could start with any code that is capable of handling open xml packages. Microsoft has OpenXML SDK, but that's .NET (MSDN HOWTO assumes you are using .NET, but explains basics of what the open xml package consists of)
AFAIK, for java, there are no open source visio libraries you could use. Java and Visio seem to live in parallel universes. The only viable commercial option I've heard of seem to be Aspose.
Interesting - whilst I cannot give a final answer, here are some thoughts:
Question 1: Why would you want to avoid commercial tools, when the final result file will require some - namely "Visio"?
1) Creating Visio files from XML:
Create template XMLs from a VSDX. Identify the files, that you need to edit. From what I've seen, these should be the masters and the pages files. Being able to make an XML from EPML, you should also know how to adapt it to a new structure.
This solution is probably by far the most tedious and less flexible.
2) Use Visio automation:
Presuming that the final document will need more than just graphics, namely shape data as well, an easier solution would consist of creating the graphics first
a) as SVG and import into Visio
b) even easier - automated drawing by Visio's automation capabilities (VBA, .Net, ...). The shapes to drop would already have been prepared as masters will all the relevant data and behaviour settings.
Then you would populate the data by means of one of the many data linking features (Wizard, Standard data linking, ODBC connections, etc.)
Related
I am able to create .mpx file by using mpxj library in java.
I need write ( create ) .mpp file in java can any one suggest me please.
I maintain MPXJ, and the short answer to your enquiry is that, at present, MPXJ does not write MPP files.
The main reason for this is simply that despite the effort which has gone into understanding the MPP file structure, there is still a great deal of it which is not well understood, hence it is difficult to reliably generate. The other issue is that even if I was to produce some code which could generate an MPP file, the features it could write to that file are likely to lag behind what MPXJ supports in the MSPDI file format, again due to my incomplete understanding of the MPP format.
My suspicion is that the next version of MS project (project 15? Project 2013?) may probably offer a ".mppx" file format, similar to the ".docx" etc formats used by other applications in the MS Office suite. This will be XML-based and will be more straightforward to generate than the binary MPP file format currently is... let's see what Microsoft come up with!
Jon
Visit http://www.mpxj.org/faq/
Can I use MPXJ to write MPP files?
Not at present. Although it is technically feasible to generate an MPP file, the knowledge we have of the file structure is still relatively incomplete, despite the amount of data we are able to correctly extract. It is therefore likely to take a considerable amount of development effort to make this work, and it is conceivable that we will not be ablet to write the full set of attributes that MPXJ supports back into the MPP file - simply because we don't understand the format well enough. You are therefore probably better off using MSPDI which does support the full range of data items present in an MPP file.
You can
Try this: http://www.aspose.com/java/project-management-component.aspx
It writes MPP and Microsoft Project XML.
But this not free
Try this: http://www.aspose.com/java/project-management-component.aspx
It writes MPP and Microsoft Project XML.
I think by "mpp" you probably mean "Microsoft PowerPoint", correct?
Q: Why do you think MPXJ (Microsoft Project Exchange/Java) can't do this?
http://www.mpxj.org/
Welcome to MPXJ! This library provides a set of facilities to allow
project information to be manipulated in Java and .Net. MPXJ supports
a range of data formats: Microsoft Project Exchange (MPX), Microsoft
Project (MPP,MPT), Microsoft Project Data Interchange (MSPDI XML),
Microsoft Project Database (MPD), Planner (XML), Primavera (PM XML,
XER, and database), and Asta Powerproject (PP, MDB).
I've been searching from hours how to generate from scratch an Open Office document (but a .doc would be glad, no docx) with a Java API (I'm using Grails). Anyway it seems that every method require a preexisting document to work correctly. I've looked on javaranch (http://www.coderanch.com/how-to/java/AccessingFileFormats) and nothing I've seen meets my desires.
So I ask you the question : is it actually possible to generate a .doc or .odt file from scratch ? Because I find that creating a document outside the code is pretty ugly.
Cheers
First, decide which "open office" you are talking about. Either it is "Office Open XML" which is the Microsoft branding of their XML document, or it is "OpenOffice" which is the native document format of "Libre Office/Open Office/Star Office" suites (and about 50 others).
Also, if you are searching for tutorials on how to access the internals of a document, odds are excellent that you will find instructions that require a document exist (to be accessed).
Perhaps searching for programmatic document creation would help, but if that doesn't land you what you need, you could note the libraries used to modify a document, and see if any of them provide APIs for "clean" document generation. Odds are good that one of them does, even if it is incomplete.
Sorry for the general answer, but it has to be general, as from the tag list, it is not even clear in which document format you intend to write.
OpenOffice.org's Universal Network Objects (UNO), allow you to generate .doc,.PDF, as well as OpenOffice documents. It supports several programming languages like: Java, C++, Visual Basic, etcc..
Some good things is that: its free, open source and plataform-independent
You can build documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. Start from scratch or using a template and fill the gaps..
In order to use it you will need to include some libraries that comes with the OpenOffice suite.
Useful links:
Open Office home
Open Office UNO Developer's Guide
Does anyone know of any API (commercial or open-source) that can generate/edit PowerPoint 2007/2010 presentations through Java. I have a template in the PowerPoint 2007/2010 format that I require to edit/update. So far I have been converting the .pptx file to xml and then editing and storing it back as .pptx. But the file gets corrupted while opening.
Is anyone aware of any other method or API that do this in Java?
We have done it programmatically (closed source at the moment, sorry) so might be able to help, but beware of a few gotchas.
One is that the POI project (at least when we looked at it last year), was quite incomplete. It didn't do PPTX Charts - which is the one feature we wanted. Infact the POI site may not be upto date, but they don't appear to support PowerPoint 20087 format (http://poi.apache.org/slideshow/index.html). Everybody recommends this project, but our evaluation was that it was pretty much useless for generating PowerPoint 2007 files via Java. Your milage may vary.
Apose also had some significant limitations when we looked at it; not doing Charts in PowerPoint 2007 being the blocking issue for us.
Another issue is that PowerPoint 2007 can be quite buggy. We have had a number of progammatically produced PPT files that caused lock ups, but when testing, we found that we can repro crashes and lock ups with simple PPTX documents created in PowerPoint 2007 - i.e. not our code.
In the end, we did the following: Unpacked a 'template' PowerPoint file to a folder, then on demand, filled the template XML with new values, zipped it up, renaming various elements & delivered it to the user as a valid PPTX. Works OK, other than the odd PowerPoint crash when people edit the file. If there was a market for it, I guess we could package up the code as a webservice (i.e xml/csv -> PPTX) or put together a commerical package, but we wouldn't do it for free.
docx4j (apache license) now includes a pptx4j component, which can open/edit/save pptx documents.
Yes. Check this out http://poi.apache.org/, they just released version 3.6 which now supports Office 2007 format documents. The best part is that it's free!
To generate a PowerPoint presentation from a template file, you can use PPT Templates.
This library provides a fluent API to replace variables inside the PPT template:
try(FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("generated.pptx")) {
new PptMapper()
.text("variable", "Hello")
.text("other_variable", "World!")
.processTemplate(PptTemplateDemo.class.getResourceAsStream("/title.pptx"))
.write(out);
}
With this library, you can process text and images in the template.
Another solution that may work for you is Windward Reports (disclaimer, I'm the founder & CEO there). It uses PPTX as one of the supported template formats and merges in data to then generate a PPTX (or PDF, etc.) output.
If the edit/update you need can be handled via the data tags in Windward, this should be trivial for you. If what you need cannot be handled by the tags, then this won't work for you.
Well as mentioned by GrantB best way is to create a template, then load the template , traverse the xml graph,update the data and stream out to a output ppt. We recently did it to generate reports for clients that had complex visuals and charts in ppt. You can have a look here generate ppt in java
I need to read a Word .doc file from Java that has text and images. I need to recognize the images & text and separate them into 2 files.
I've recently heard about "Apache POI." How I can use Apache POI to read Word .doc files?
The examples and sample code on apache's site are pretty good. I recommend you start there.
http://poi.apache.org/hwpf/quick-guide.html
To get specific bits of text, first create a org.apache.poi.hwpf.HWPFDocument. Fetch the range with getRange(), then get paragraphs from that. You can then get text and other properties.
Here for an example of extracting an image. Here for the latest revision as of this writing.
And of course, the Javadocs
Note that, according to the POI site,
HWPF is still in early development.
It's not free (or even cheap!) but Aspose.Words should be able to do this. Their evaluation download will let you play with small files.
Do the destination files also have to be Docs? You could open the docs in Office and save them out as HTML. Then the separation becomes trivial. RTF is also a viable option, but I can't recommend a good RTF parser off the top of my head.
Edit to say: I just remembered another possible solution: Jacob, but you'll need an instance of Office running on the same machine. It's short for Java COM Bridge and it lets you make calls to the COM libraries in Office to manipulate the documents. I'm sure it's not as scary as it might sound!
Hi I'm looking to parse spreadsheets (xls/ods) in Groovy. I have been using the Roo library for Ruby and was looking to try the same tasks in Groovy, as Java is already installed on a development server I use, and I would like to keep the number of technologies on the server to a simple core few.
I am aware that the ods format is zipped XML, and so can be parsed as such, but I would like to process the file using spreadsheet concepts, not XML concepts.
The ability to process xls files is not of major importance, but would save me having to save multiple xls files to ods (as this is for parsing data from clients).
Thanks
I would suggest Apache POI for access to .xls files.
I've never had to work with the .ods format, so no information on that one.
There's also JExcelAPI, which has a nice, clean, simple interface (for the most part).
Can't help you with ODS Files though.
How about looking at 'odftoolkit' ? http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org/
Groovy in Action has a chapter named "Groovy on Windows" that discusses using Scriptom, a Groovy/COM bridge (using JACOB under the covers), to access several Windows apps including Excel.
For OpenOffice, you can use ODF Toolkit, as Amit pointed out.
I second jdmichal's vote for Apache POI. I have selected it as our library of choose to handle Excel file input (.XLS). The project is also working on the .XLSX file format if you ever decide you want to support that. Based on your specifications, I don't think you want to get into converting things into CSV and it seems like you have established input and output paths. For anyone who hasn't had the joy of dealing with CSV to Excel conversion, it can get a bit dicey. I have spent hours dealing with issues created by Excel converting string data to numeric data. You can see other testimonies to this effect on the POI Case Studies page. Beyond these issues, I simply don't want to personally have to handle these inputs. I'd rather invest the programming effort and streamline the workflow for the future.
I too have not dealt with ODF and have no plans to support it in my current project. You might want to check out the OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit Project.
Good luck and have fun,
- D.
I suggest you to take a look at SimpleXlsBuilder and SimpleXlsSlurper, both are based on apache POI and can fit your basic needs for reading from and writing to Excel 97 spreadsheets in a concise way.
If your spreadsheets are simple enught - without charts and other embedded contents - you should simply convert the spreadsheet to CSV.
Pros:
Both xls and ods will produce the same CSV - You'll have to handle just one input type.
You won't have to mess with new versions of (Open) Office.
Handling plaintext is always more fun than other obscure formats.
Cons:
One that I can think of - finding a reliable converter from xls and odf to csv. Shouldn't be too hard - OpenOffice has a built in one.
A couple things:
1) I agree that using a CSV format can simplify some of the development work. OpenCSV can help with processing CSV files. There are other good CSV parsers for Java out there. Just remember that anything that's available for Java can be used by Groovy due to Groovy's unparalleled integration with Java.
2) I know you said you wanted to avoid handling XML, but Groovy makes XML processing exceedingly simple.