IPCCX 7 - Read from Excel file

SAN J · ‎12-10-2009

Is it possible to write a script that pulls data from an Excel file? I usually get data from an xml file (or through DB Dips via ODBC) but am not sure if it's the same process for getting data from an excel file. Is this even do-able?

Also, I heard that pulling or writing data to an xml file that resides outside of the IPCCX server is no longer supported? This true? I know some of these might not be do-able anymore in 8X but am curious about 7X for now.

Anthony Holloway · ‎12-10-2009

Technically speaking you can read any file, from anywhere.

The challenge is parsing the data. There are builtin steps to parse XML documents, and plain text documents (i.e., txt, csv)

Wikipedia: MS Excel File Format

Snippet:

Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) as its primary format.^[4] Excel 2007 uses Office Open XML as its primary file format, an XML-based format that followed after a previous XML-based format called "XML Spreadsheet" ("XMLSS"), first introduced in Excel 2002.

So perhaps the newer versions can be read via XML, but I have not personally tried this.

As for reading documents off other servers, hosting them via a web service is always a clean solution:

Document myXMLDoc = URL[http://www.company.com/files/customer/1022345/xml]