I read somewhere that the plan was to have .XLSX support available in the VCL version of Flexcel in time for release of Rad Studio XE2. Has this been achieved or can we expect it soon?
Bruce
We are expecting a beta of 5.0 by the end of september. Currently code is working, but we are in a testing phase to make sure everything is ok.
We will be releasing an updated 3.x this week to add support for XE2, and as said, probably by the end of september a beta of FlexCel 5.
Regards,
Adrian.
That's really good news. Congratulations! I look forward to seeing it released. Any indications yet on pricing?
Bruce
Pricing hasn't been discussed yet, so I can't say much. It will probably be a little more expensive, but it shouldn't be more than the current .NET license.
Any advance on this yet ?
Bruce
Well, it was much more work than I expected, but today we got the engine finished, all 460,000 lines of code. There is still some heavy testing going on, but things are looking great. I should be writing a blog post this weekend with much more detailed information and probably giving a release date. We will probably be releasing first the code for reading/writing xls/x files, soon after that the code for rendering/ exporting to pdf and finally the new report engine. All parts are working, but right now we are focusing the testing in the core engine, so that't what we will be releasing first.
As always, sorry for all the delays, but I hope the wait will be worth.
Adrian.
Great. I look forward to it.
Bruce
As a little spoiler, yesterday we tried it in FireMonkey (osx, not ios) and it worked fine. Here it is an screenshot of OSX-Excel showing an xlsx file which was created by a simple FM app in osx, which opened an xlsx file, processed it and saved it:
As most of FlexCel code is not visual, it doesn't look like much, but it means the zip engine, our custom xmlreader/writers and all the object model, parsing and saving is working fine.
Ps: For those interested in FM support, we will be for sure supporting the non visual parts, FlexCel 5 has been designed from the start to be cross plat, with the platform dependent code isolated in a few units. But I am not sure we will port the visual stuff (rendering), depends on the demand from users and quantity of work. Also there won't be probably ios support until embarcadero launches its own compiler, since fpc doesn't support dots in unit.names. (And I don't feel like renaming 1600 units to not use dots, at least not right now)
Anyway, this was just a small detour, we now will continue working in the vcl part to see if we can ship this already.
Regards,
Adrian.
Adrian Gallero2011-10-26 05:22:15
Hi Adrian,
Paul.
I have uploaded a preview of FlexCel 5 for VCL/Firemonkey to our site, it should be available to all registered users as soon as I write a small article on what it is, how to use it, etc. Final version is going to take some more time, not sure how much yet.
Please check tomorrow the blog for more information
It would be interesting to know how does it work with very large files?
Like one million records?
Mike
Well, FlexCel, like Excel itself (or any other spreadsheet/spreadsheet component) needs to keep the full file in memory, in order to do recalculations and modify formulas when you insert cells. For example, if you insert a row in Sheet1!A1 and you have in Sheet2 the formula = sum(Sheet1!A1:c1), then the formula in sheet2 has to be updated to be =sum(sheet1!a2:c2). And so on. In short, a single change in a single cell might propagate to every other cell in the file.
So, you have to keep this in mind, you need a lot of memory for huge spreadsheets (it might be worth to have 64 bit too) Excel isn't a database (even when many of us use it as if it was one) and it isn't designed in a way that allows working with small parts of the file.
That being said, FlexCel does handle well huge spreadsheets, provided you have the memory.