status of this project?

[westwick]

Hello, I found this repo like most people after realizing the original forked project doesn't provide style support, and am trying to incorporate it into an Angular project. I have it working but it feels very "hacky" and just wondering if this is normal, or am I doing something wrong, and what the status of this fork is?

For example, to even get it to work I had to modify cpexcel.js and remove the require for cptable (replaced with var cpt = cptable;). Should this change be committed and released to npm?

Also, some of the functionality from original xlsx-js appeared to not be working in this fork, e.g. utils.book_new() was not working, utils.book_append_sheet(), utils.json_to_sheet(), writeFile(), etc. -- so what I ended up having to do was use both forks of this project, and export from xlsx then import into xlsx-style, like so:

import * as XLSX from 'xlsx';
import * as sheets from 'xlsx-style';

const wb = XLSX.utils.book_new();
XLSX.utils.book_append_sheet(wb, someSheet, 'sheetname');
const out = XLSX.write(wb, { type: 'base64'});

// take the output from xlsx lib and pass it into xlsx-style lib
const styledwb = sheets.read(out);
// we can now apply styles
// however writeFile wasn't working so had to add implementation to convert and trigger download with file-saver
const newOut = sheets.write(styledwb, wopts); // ouput type=binary
const test = new Blob([this.s2ab(newOut)], {type: ''});
saveAs(test, 'test.xlsx');

So this all works, but I guess my big question is, am I doing something wrong? Are those functions expected to work in this fork, or is the above code basically necessary at this point in time? Thanks for any insight!

[pietersv]

@westwick Great question, if you can contact me directly it'd be great to have a thought partner to think through this. I'd like to develop this further but the conundrum is while there seems to be a market need to develop this branch of js-xlsx it may consist of exactly zero customers as there is a separate commercial branch for anyone with a budget.

[westwick]

sure will reach out

[jlbeard84]

+1 for being interested in further developments 👍

[donhmorris]

I would be interested in seeing this go further since getting the pro version is a clunky process.

I too was puzzled in how to use this package. I looks to me you use the original xlsx package to setup your sheets and then you render (write) with this package. That is what worked for me. I did find a bug in processing fills with a background color for cells. I'm modifying my local and may try to get my fix into the repo.

[jlbeard84]

@donhmorris I ended up forking another library and adding fills for background colors. It ended up being a little closer to my requirements.

https://github.com/jlbeard84/zipcelx if you're interested at all.

[donhmorris]

@jlbeard84 Thanks for sharing.

My client wants to use excel as a report rendering engine with colors, headlines, groups, etc. In his domain they use excel to pass around information quite a bit.

If I get stuck I may setup a windows server in amazon light sail and use .net. I’ve used .net for creating custom excel workbooks before. The libraries and tools are really good for this in .net.

[pietersv]

@donhmorris This library supports background colors, etc, lots of examples in example_style.js. Try installing it from github directly (git install github:protobi/js-xlsx) rather than npm.

For what you're doing setting up a separate server shd not be necessary.

If all you're doing is creating Excel XLSX and you don't need to read XLSX, XLS or write XLSB files, then there a lots of node libraries to suport that. One very lightweight one is msexcelbuilder.
https://github.com/protobi/msexcel-builder.

[pietersv]

this is #90

[donhmorris]

I tried with rgb values and it paints in black every time.

I’m pretty sure I found a bug in the code. I’ll try github and I will also try using an indexed color with the theme.