[kepler-dev] calling kepler from Open Office Calc

[Rick Moore]

Thanks for the info, Christopher. Looks like this has been desired for 
some time, but no-one has tried to tackle it.

I looked at POI for Excel. It is good for manipulating data in files but 
doesn't provide any way to communicate with a live Excel instance. 
Haven't spent nearly enough time with the Open Office API, but it 
appears that it lets you write apps that can communicate directly with a 
live OO instance.

We also considered writing actors that read/write spreadsheet files from 
Kepler, but that doesn't provide the level of interactivity that our 
users want. Perhaps a Swing widget like that suggested in your second 
refernece might work for us.

Whichever way we go, I'm sure we'll need lots of help from people like you.

Thanks again,

Rick Moore

Christopher Brooks wrote:
> Hi Rick,
> Yes, one way would be to invoke Kepler as a headless application from Open Office Calc.
> You can set model parameters from the command line, see
> http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/kepler/pipermail/kepler-dev/2009-July/015343.html
>
> If Open Office Calc can invoke a Java program, then you can invoke Kepler.
>
> For information about going the other way, where Kepler communicates with Excel,
> see
> http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/kepler/pipermail/kepler-dev/2009-July/015343.html
> and
> https://embedded.eecs.berkeley.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38
>
> _Christopher
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Rick Moore <rem63 at cornell.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 2:17 pm
> Subject: [kepler-dev] calling kepler from Open Office Calc
> To: kepler-dev at kepler-project.or
>> Some of our scientists have asked us to investigate the 
>> possibility of calling Kepler workflows directly from Open 
>> Office Calc. The desire is to use Calc's builtin abilities to 
>> select columns for analysis/validation, run a workflow on those 
>> columns and display results/changes directly within the spreadsheet.
>>
>> I don't have a lot of experience with Kepler, but my gut feel is 
>> that we would have to run Kepler as a batch process from OO and 
>> transfer data between them via temp files. Has anyone 
>> investigated this before ? Or does anyone on the Kepler dev team 
>> have any insights as to how difficult it would be to do 
>> something that integrates the two apps more tightly ?
>>
>> Rick Moore
>> Content Management Specialist
>> Information Science
>> Cornell University
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