I have a system with an Excel spreadsheet template file which is used for invoicing. I would like the user to be able to click a button on an Xpage, which will then open the spreadsheet and enter the latest invoicing data in Excel. I don’t mind if Excel is either the application on their machine or on the server, but my preference would be the application locally on their machine.
I’ve looked into Xagents, as I feel this is probably the answer. I know they can be used to create Excel but I have not been able to locate any mention of opening an Excel file, and entering data into specific cells.
Is this possible?
EDIT: you can use Apache POI for editing and creating Microsoft Office documents. This is a java project which gives you a handle to office documents and this can be used using java.
A good starting point can be the blog of Christian Guedemann from webgate:
http://guedebyte.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/documents-and-spreadsheets-with-xpages-building-the-kernel-part-ii/
(end of edit)
The only way I KNOW and tried to write data from Notes to Excel is exporting the data to an HTML page and setting the Content Type accordingly (e. g. as described here (there are a lot more resources available for taht):
http://www.dominoguru.com/pages/developer2010_xpagexlsexport.html
I am not sure if this is of help but it seems that this project can help you:
http://www.openntf.org/internal/home.nsf/project.xsp?action=openDocument&name=ZK%20Spreadsheet%20for%20XPages
As far as I can see this project can load Excel files from XPages – and then it should also be possible to edit the files.
Besides that the only solution I can think of is a Notes Agent that is called from the XPage. This agent can then run in background and do all the excel stuff. After running, the XPage can show a link to the Excel file. Actually this is the solution I would consider to implement – but maybe others step in with better answers here.