Java Back End to Word/PowerPoint Front End

[scohan]

Is it possible to have a Java/Unix server side back end that serves data (perhaps via XML) to a Word/PowerPoint front end?

Is it possible to allow the user to make changes to the Word/PowerPoint front end (perhaps in some type of defined fields within the file) and save those changes back to the Java/Unix server side, and ultimately to a database?

Thanks.

 

[goaway1234]

Interesting proposition, but unfortunately Microsoft and Sun don't make it easy on you. The only way I could imagine such an app would involve using some kind of intermediary, like XML or a database as you suggested, or perhaps even SOAP. Whatever solution you come up with, you would certainly have to use a MS technology for the front-end, Office/VBA would probably be the route with least development time.

What kind of app is this; can you tell me more about it?

 

[scohan]

Currently it is a Java/Swing client/server app, pretty much presenting text to the user. We are in the process of converting it to a web app.

Last week, a user suggested that the app would better serve the user if they could work with Word and Powerpoint to access the data vs a web browser. He was touting Ofice 2003, Biztalk, InfoPath, and Sharepoint. He would like to be able bring up a Word doc or Powerpoint file (populated with data from a database), edit the data, and save it (which results in saving the data back in the database). He even suggested being able to have several versions of the Word doc, and being able to revert back to a previous version (which results in changing the data in the database back to the data in the previous version).

However, the overall achitectural direction from the customer, is Java/J2EE, not .Net. While providing his vision I'm sure could be done, I think it would be at much greater cost than just having him go to a web page (or Java Web Start app).

Thanks for the response.

Any thoughts from anyone are welome.

 

[goaway1234]

You are right that it would be a much greater cost than just going to a web page, but it wouldn't be that hard to implement. You could still keep with your customer's directions, satisfying your MS(issy) users could be as simple as giving them a single file Word template to edit the data. How is your back end setup; would it be feasible to setup an ODBC Data source to the same back-end?

If so, then you could have a template that runs some VBA code (a macro in Word) when it starts up. On startup it would select some information from the ODBC source and format it in a new document. Your problem here is that these programs are horrible for editing structured information as they don't enforce any constraints on what can be contained in the document.

This means you can do one of two things: just get one big glob of information from a database, allow the user to edit it, and save it back to the database without validating input or anything like that; OR try to use a table to enforce structure. The former would require you to take care that your content isn't saved in some Office-only format. The latter would require you to use VBA and the Word object model to duplicate a database table in a word document, then allow the user to edit it, and then save the information back to the database on exit. Both approaches can be accomplished with one Word or Excel file and an ODBC source for the backend.

 

[byam]

You can use XMetal (

http://www.xmetal.com)

as a font end XML content editor, instead of Word/Power point. It allow you to customize look and feel (form like) for individual DTD/schema. It can also interact with a IE brower running within XMetal, so that you can use IE to upload/download XML data from server accordingly.