buildnode

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This library contains tools for building XML based documents of different formats.

Buildnode supports these formats:

HTML5

XHTML

Excel

XUL - XML User Interface Language, XML-based language for building user interfaces of applications like Firefox.

KML - XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps.

To test this library, let's make a script which will fetch COVID-19 stats and produce the Excel spreadsheet.

First, we need a function which will fetch data. It uses "dexador" to make GET http request and "jonathan" to parse received JSON:

POFTHEDAY> (defun get-data () (loop with response = (dex:get "https://api.covid19api.com/summary") with parsed = (jonathan:parse response) for item in (getf parsed :|Countries|) collect item into results finally (return (sort results #'> :key (lambda (item) (getf item :|TotalConfirmed|)))))) POFTHEDAY> (get-data) ((:|Date| "2020-04-08T11:51:39Z" :|TotalRecovered| 21763 :|NewRecovered| 2182 :|TotalDeaths| 12721 :|NewDeaths| 1938 :|TotalConfirmed| 396221 :|NewConfirmed| 29614 :|Slug| "united-states" :|CountryCode| "US" :|Country| "United States of America") (:|Date| "2020-04-08T11:51:39Z" :|TotalRecovered| 43208 :|NewRecovered| 2771 :|TotalDeaths| 14045 :|NewDeaths| 704 :|TotalConfirmed| 141942 :|NewConfirmed| 5267 :|Slug| "spain" :|CountryCode| "ES" :|Country| "Spain") (:|Date| "2020-04-08T11:51:39Z" :|TotalRecovered| 24392 :|NewRecovered| 1555 :|TotalDeaths| 17127 :|NewDeaths| 604 :|TotalConfirmed| 135586 :|NewConfirmed| 3039 :|Slug| "italy" :|CountryCode| "IT" :|Country| "Italy") ...)

Now we can create Excel document:

POFTHEDAY> (excel:with-excel-workbook () (ss:worksheet '("ss:Name" "COVID-19") (ss:table () ;; The first raw will contain a title (ss:row () (buildnode:set-attribute (ss:string-cell "COVID-19 Cases") "ss:MergeAcross" 2)) ;; Next we'll skip one row and make ;; a table header on the third row: (excel:set-index 3 (ss:row () (ss:header-cell "Country") (ss:header-cell "Total Cases"))) ;; Now it's time to add rows with data (loop for item in (get-data) collect (ss:row () (ss:string-cell (getf item :|Country|)) (ss:string-cell (format nil "~A" (getf item :|TotalConfirmed|)))))))) POFTHEDAY> (buildnode:write-doc-to-file * "covid-19.xml")

If we open resulting XML in the Excel, we can find all our data on the page.

As you can see, we can set different properties for cells. For example, our title merges across two cells and column headers have their own color:

So, this library can be used to create files in different XML based formats. Other examples are available on the GitHub.