Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
136 lines (104 loc) · 4.58 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

136 lines (104 loc) · 4.58 KB
Raw

CircleCI Coverage Status Documentation

Introduction

from htmxl.compose import Workbook

workbook = Workbook()
workbook.add_sheet_from_template(
    template="""
    <head>{{ title }}</head>
    <body>
      <div>
        Hello down there, {{ name }}!
      </div>
      <div>
        <table>
          <thead>
            <tr>
              {% for column_name in column_names %}
                <th>{{ column_name }}</th>
              {% endfor %}
            </tr>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            {% for row in rows %}
              <tr>
                <td>{{ row.a }}</td>
                <td>{{ row.b }}</td>
              </tr>
            {% endfor %}
          </tbody>
        </table
      </div>
    </body>
    """,
    data=dict(
        title="Hello World",
        name='Bob',
        column_names=['A', 'B'],
        rows=[{'a': 'a', 'b': 2}, {'a': 'b', 'b': 2}, {'a': 'c', 'b': 3}],
    )
)

workbook.compose('hello_world.xlsx')

example

The Pitch

Essentially, HTM(x)L is an attempt to allow the declaration of Excel files in a (mostly) declarative manner that separates the format that the document should take from the data being added to it.

The "normal" manner of producing Excel files essentially amounts to a series of imperitive statements about what cells to modify to get the excel file you want. For any file of moderate complexity, this leads to there being very little intuition about what the resulting Excel file will actually look like.

Particularly once you start adding cell styling, or finding yourself inserting dynamically-sized data (requiring a bunch of cell offset math), the relative ease of designing and visualizing the template using a familiar idiom, HTML, can be make it much much easier to author and maintain these kinds of templates.

Features

General features include:

  • HTML elements as metaphors for structures in the resulting Excel document

    Due to the obviously grid-oriented structure of Excel, the metaphors can sometimes be approximate, but should hopefully make intuitive sense!

    For example:

    • <span>: An inline-block element which pushes elements after it to the right
    • <div>: An block element which push elements after it downward
    • <table>: Self-explanatory!

    See the documentation about elements for more details

  • Styling

    Some commonly/obviously useful and style options like width/height (style="width: 50px") or rowspan/colspan colspan="2" have been implemented, but there's no reason that various different options that make intuitive sense (like colors) could be implemented also

    See the documentation about styling for more details

  • Classes

    While inline color styles are not (yet) implemented, one can supply classes normally, class="class1 class2" and supply the definitions for those classes as inputs to the Workbook

    styles = [
    {"name": "odd", "pattern_fill": {"patternType": "solid", "fgColor": "FBEAFB"}},
]
Workbook(styles=styles)

Installation

There is no default parser (for HTML) included with a default installation of the package. We do this for both backwards compatibility and future compatibility reasons.

In order to keep the base package lean when one opts to use one or the other parser, we include a set of bundled parser-adaptor implementations for known supported parser libraries

To opt into the installation of the dependent library for the parser you chose:

# Slower, but more permissive
pip install htmxl[beautifulsoup]

# Faster, but more strict
pip install htmxl[lxml]

By default, the package will detect installed parser libraries and choose the first one we find, so a vanilla Workbook() instantiation should Just Work.

However, we encourage users to explicitly select their parser to avoid inadvertant selection of the "wrong" parser at runtime (given that they have template compatibility issues)

from htmxl.compose import Workbook

workbook = Workbook(parser='beautifulsoup')
workbook = Workbook(parser='lxml')