[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Pivot Table data provider extension framework (removal possibility)

[Eike Rathke]

Hi Kohei,

On Tuesday, 2013-03-12 11:41:32 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:

> I'd like to ask whether someone actually uses this Pivot Table data
> provider extension framework, because I'd like to remove this if
> nobody is using it, or only few people are using it.

From what I remember that can be used to populate pivot tables with data
obtained from external resources like databases. Unfortunately you'll
hardly find such extensions in the wild but more within enterprises and
corporate users, so determining whether it's actually used or not is
nearly impossible unless someone knows who those customers are.

> I believe the same functionality can be achieve via database
> connectivity, by having such external data provider register as a
> database, and use it to act as a data provider for pivot tables.
> So, I don't see a reason why we need to keep this as a separate data
> source category.

IMHO the advantage of the data provider is that the actual data does not
have to reside in the spreadsheet, allowing for massive amounts of data
records but providing only the information necessary for the pivot
table. This maybe could be accomplished as well using a registered data
source, but currently we have no means to pull the data without actually
storing it in the spreadsheet for further processing. Or isn't that the
case?

> The way it is currently implemented also makes it *extremely*
> difficult for us to optimize the pivot table engine, because all its
> functionality has to go through the UNO API which forces us to do
> data conversion *twice* for every single transaction.  That's very
> very expensive especially as the data size grows (and it always
> does).

Seconded.

> So, I'd *love* to get rid of this sooner rather than later, and I'd
> like to know whether there are people who would absolutely need this
> functionality, and if so why.  As I said above, I believe the same
> functionality could be achieved via the database connectivity
> backend even if we remove the extension backend.

I think there work needs to be done to pull the data and provide it in
a form that pivot tables can actually process. It may be viable, but I'm
really not familiar with pivot table topics.

  Eike

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