gradesheet-rows.rb

 Process rows from an OpenOffice spreadsheet, tailored for class gradesheet.
 Copyright (C) 2005 by Allyn Dimock

 Application is to be run on a secure server with access to a grade sheet file.
 It can be sent a message with a student id, and will return a HTML table
 containing the contents of the visible spreadsheet columns for the student's
 row, and for pre-selected rows of the spreadsheet.

development notes

bug in REXML: in Ruby 1.8.2, order of "table-column"s not maintained by: col_descs = content_doc.root.get_elements(’.//table:table[position()=1]/table:table-column’)

31-May-2005: Had problems with REXML::XPath.match( rows[rownum - 1], ’.//table:table-cell’) returning <table:table-cell> elements in arbitrary order rather than in order in XML document so used REXML::Element and REXML::Elements methods instead. drilling down to "table-row" then getting "table-cell".

This failure to maintain order in REXML feels like a bug to me, although no promise is made to maintain order. when fixed, some XPATH expressions in the following program can be combined.

Required files