How to read excel file tibco activities? - tibco

Question

I have a requirement to read excel file using tibco palettes.Can any body please throw some lights regarding this. I am basically new to this tibco BW. Please tell me what steps should I follow?

Answer 1

I am assuming you are not referring to CSV files, for which you could use the File Read and Parse activities of BW.
If you want to parse or render a multi-worksheet workbook, you can try publicly available API's such as Apache's POI or commercial API's such as from Aspose to cut your own Java based solution. Then you can use the Java Code or general Java activities to embed and use that code.
And then there's another ready-to-use option available from us: an Excel Plugin for TIBCO BusinessWorks, if you wish to leverage all built-in features of BW (XPath mapping, etc) when parsing or rendering your Excel.
Edit 1:
As per your comment, you can also try the following steps, if you are looking for a more homegrown solution.
Based on one of the (public/commercial) libraries above you can write generic Java Code to parse each cell of each row of each sheet of the workbook. Output should be an XML string. Then create an XSD to match your output. It is at your discretion, which information of the cell you want to read from the workbook - you already are aware of the complexity of the API, I am sure.
Create a BW (sub)process that calls your code from a Java activity, use Parse XML to parse your XML string result into you XSD structure. Configure the End activity to use your XSD and map (copy) your Parse XML result into the End activity.
Then wrap this subprocess into a Custom Activity (General Activities Palette). Create a Custom Palette and now you can re-use what you did in many other BW projects. The path to the custom palettes can be found in TIBCO Designer - Edit- Preferences - General - User Directories
If you add Error Output schemas, you will also get typed error outputs from that custom activity.
HTH,
Hendrik