Working with templates

Imagine that you need, for example, integrate a lot of diagrams or complex formulas into a spreadsheet produced by the HadoopOffice library. We decided against integrating all these features into HadoopOffice, because this would mean a lot of development and testing effort. Additionally, the library will become itself very complex and difficult to use. Hence, the library supports only reading/writing of raw data.

Instead we added a much better feature for you: templating (available as of version 1.0.4).

The idea is simple. You design diagrams, complex formulas etc. in your spreadsheet program and save it as a normal document. Then you use this template as input when writing data in your Big Data job using the HadoopOffice library. In case of a diagram you would simply fill the cells to which the diagram is referring with data from your Big Data platform.

The feature is very easy to use. Simply specify the following options:

• hadoopoffice.write.template.file - to point to the template (can be HDFS, local file - anything that is supported by the hadoop libraries)
• hadoopoffice.write.template.password - Optional. Password of the template in case it is encrypted.

Then, you simply execute your Big Data job and fill the corresponding cells. Voila you have a spreadsheet with fancy diagrams and formulas filled with data from your Big Data processing platform.