Hello:
First of all, I should say the support that Aspose provides is excellent and very responsive.
However, there is something that bothers me, and I would like to have this discussion about the way you guys fix things that we report.
It seems to me that often fixes are focused on a narrowed scope, and I understand that. I personally always try to provide a sample application + spreadsheet to reproduce the issue I report, and you’ve been very good at reproducing stuff in your environment and so on.
The problem that I have is that sometimes, you fix something very specific, but that something affects a lot more, and the side effect is not actually tested. I think the person that fixes an issue should step back, analyze the impact of the change, and look at the bigger picture, see what other things could be affected or what other things have to be added.
I will give you an example. I have asked a while ago to be able to get the result of the evaluation of the conditional formattings (see this thread: Conditional formatting of a cell - data bars & color scales ).
A new feature has been added where I could get an object of the class ConditionalFormattingResult. At the time I didn’t have time to do a lot of testing and I was happy about it. Stepping back and thinking about this change, adding this class is quite a complex change. The calculation engine has to be changed to be able to compute conditional formattings, in case it wasn’t already doing this. The change had also to tap into the calculation engine and for given cell, retrieve the result of the conditional formatting evaluation. So, it is not simple. In my mind, I would have structured the ConditionalFormattingResult class differently by including FormatCondition objects. In the end what I wanted was to get the result of the conditional formatting objects. Again, it is a complex subject, that needed some good analysis.
After that, as I used this feature, I started to discover other issues:
- computing the color scale min & max values: ColorScale conditional formatting
- some crashes in certain conditions: ConditionalFormattingResult.ConditionalFormattingIcon crashes in certain conditions
-some icons were incorrect: Iconset conditional formatting doesn't return the right icons
- posted questions about conditional formatting: Conditional formatting questions
- conditional formatting incorrect:
Conditional formatting evaluation incorrect
So, I created this thread to make the suggestion that perhaps, sometimes, it is needed to dig more into these issues and be more proactive, rather than being reactive and waiting for us to report things and limit your fixes to very specific issues.
I know it is a very complex space, Excel is vast, and in the end this is a balancing act.
I was also curious, if I report my issues for .Net, do you guys check the Java side as well?
thanks
Hi Costa,
Thanks for your posting and using Aspose.Cells.
We try our best to fix issues in as generalized way as it could be. However, still bugs remain because of vastness of MS-Excel features and not all scenarios could be covered in limited time. We therefore sometime need specific source files and the specific code to reproduce the issue.
We always keep adding new features and enhancements on customer requests and requirements. By the time, we will add lot of improvements in conditional formatting related code which will surely need more time, research and development.
In order to quickly meet customer’s requirements and fixing their bugs, we provide a minor release once in a week and major release once in a month. We make sure both minor and major releases are equally good for production use.
Normally, whatever bug is found in .NET is also found in Java, because we port .NET code to Java and both versions have same set of features and APIs. Whenever we make new features and enhancements in Aspose.Cells for .NET, it automatically becomes available in Aspose.Cells for Java.
Hi:
I have another example of a change that doesn’t work. Please see my post:
https://forum.aspose.com/t/86757
The question is, how can you release these changes if they don’t work properly? The development team and its manager should revise the current process of how changes are done.
Personally I wouldn’t mind waiting longer between releases, if the changes are implemented properly.
What you guys do now is like someone offering me a cup without a bottom to drink water. Here is a nice cup, you can have it, but wait, I cannot drink from it because it doesn’t have a bottom.
As it is right now it is not conducive to build trust in your product.
Hi Costa,
Thanks for your posting and considering Aspose.Cells.
We are sorry for your inconvenience. We have logged your concerns in our database. Hopefully, your issue will be fixed soon and you will not encounter any problem in our next release.