[cruise9]

I'd love to hear how you integrated a Java and TCL backend with spreadsheets. I'm assuming this isn't something you can do with excel?

(Logistics at the small business I work at, is run on a mess of excel spreadsheets with complicated formulas and occasionally VBA for some email functionality. I have a feeling we're doing things horribly wrong, but I don't know of any better way to do things with our zero IT budget.)

[Timothycquinn]

I did not leverage any VBA or VB. I learned to code in VBA and written way too much code in that space and was well aware of the limitations.

I'm pretty sure the way it went was, on check-in of a new version, I had a Java program that read the spreadsheet validated that all the right sheets were there and that the columns on each sheet conformed with the spec and also validated rows of data. The sheets were translated on each front end node for easy access.

Regarding the expression engine, the the expressions themselves were then translated into TCL boolean expressions. The attributes for the related objects where already loaded into memory into dictionaries and then the expressions were just evaluated to get a boolean result.