OpenL Tablets Structure and Semantics

Parsing Algorithm

OpenL Tablets splits all the spreadsheets in Excel document into a set of logical tables. Each table consists of the set of the connected non-empty cells. Then tables are being checked if they belong to one of the Table Types and compiled into OpenL OpenClass. All other tables are ignored and considered comments. The actual location of the table is absolutely arbitrary and you can freely move tables, rename worksheets, etc. without any effect on the final result of the parsing.

Table Types

Table Type is defined by a first keyword in a first table cell. Currently OpenL Tablets support the following Table Types:

Table Type	Keyword(s)
Decision Table	Rules, DT
Data Table	Data
Test Table	Testmethod
Run Data Table	Runmethod
Datatype Table	Datatype
Method Table	Method, Code
Configuration Table	Environment

This list is definitely not final and will be updated in a future. We are going to add Lookup Tablets (to provide efficient multi-dimensional lookups), FSM Transition Tablets that are best suited to handle complex BPM-like state transitions and may be some more to facilitate template based table parsing

Also see Decision Tables , Data Tables , Tutorial