Handle SpreadsheetML (Excel 2003) xml data

[jandrew]

This is the pre-2007 Microsoft spreadsheet format for saving sheets as XML. The data is saved in a non-zipped xml file with with an xls or xml extension. Since Excel won't read the data with an .xls extension I won't try to differentiate either. In the wild I have mostly seen this data as the export from MySQL when the user selects 'export->excel'. Since .xml isn't an extension unique to microsoft this package will assume that some tabular data is available in the xml file and attempt to extract it as much as possible into rows and columns for reading.

The long term goal is for the package to (in this order)

• [x] Differentiate between zipped separate sub-XML files or a single long XML file containing all the subsets of data
• [x] identify the source/location of each available sub data set and connect it to a parser
  • [x] If the sub data set needs a file handle then it should open a file handle to that data (Via Archive::Zip?) then load it to an xml parser
  • [x] If the sub data is a component of a single xml file then an xml parser should locate each available subsection and extract it to an xml parser
• [x] Then the program should then add roles needed for each data set to accomplish it's mission
• [x] The program will then pull data as available. If the section is not available it should fail gracefully

[jandrew]

Requires completion of #3

[jandrew]

It appears that one source of this tab data targeted at the Excel application is MySQL workbench. I have a feeling there is a Python generator out there somewhere that spits out flat xml instead of zipped files also. If anyone has examples of this type of file I would like to use them in testing.

[jandrew]

OK so the second bullet appears to need a bigger rewrite than I expected and the reading/learning I am doing in Head First Design Patterns isn't making this a smaller task! In any case I have some time to work on this over the weekend but I may not finish and as a consequence I might push the milestone delivery to early May.

[jandrew]

OK, Just an update on this issue. The move to portland and a raft of issues with this package needed to integrate it with Spreadsheet::Read have set this back substantially. This is tied to milestone v0.40.2 which was supposed to follow v0.38.8 but I have already released through v0.38.16 with a set of open issues for v0.38.18. I have rolled an update to the base xml handling into the main branch that should make this go smoother in the long run but I'm still a ways out.