How to create a cfspreadsheet with protected cells

Question

I am creating a spreadsheet object using cfspreadsheet. Would like to make some of the individual cells as protected (read-only). Please let me know if anybody has tried this before.

I did try putting cell format as locked but it did not seems to work. Here is the sample code:

<cfset a = spreadsheetnew()>
<cfset format1 = structNew()>
<cfset format1.locked=true>
<cfset SpreadsheetFormatCell(a,format1,1,1)>
<cfspreadsheet action="write" filename="#expandpath('.')#/test.xls" name="a" overwrite="true">

Thanks.

Answer 1

Locking a cell does nothing unless the sheet is protected ie using cfspreadsheet's password attribute. But doing so has some negative side effects ...

Protecting the sheet locks all cells. That means you essentially have to "unlock" everything else by applying a format. In theory you could just unlock the entire sheet:

<cfset SpreadsheetFormatCellRange (sheet, {locked=false}, 1, 1, maxRow, maxCol)>

However, that has the nasty effect of populating every single cell in the sheet. So if you read the file into a query, the query would contain ~65,536 rows and 256 columns. Even if you only populated a few cells explicitly.

The lock feature is better suited to cases where you want everything to be locked except a few cells (not the reverse). Unless that is what you are doing, I probably would not bother with it, given all the negative side effects.

Side effect example

    <cfset testFile = "c:/test.xls">
    <cfset sheet = spreadsheetNew()>
    <!--- only unlocking 100 rows to demonstrate --->
    <cfset SpreadsheetFormatCellRange (sheet, {locked=false}, 1, 1, 100, 10)>

    <!--- populate two cells --->
    <cfset SpreadsheetSetCellValue(sheet,"LOCKED",1,1)>
    <cfset SpreadsheetSetCellValue(sheet,"UNLOCKED",2,1)>

    <!--- make one cell locked --->
    <cfset SpreadsheetFormatCell(sheet, {locked=true}, 1, 1)>

    <cfspreadsheet action="write"
            name="sheet"
            fileName="#testFile#"
            password="" 
            overwrite="true" >

    <!--- now see it is filled with empty cells --->    
    <cfspreadsheet action="read"
            query="sheetData"
            src="#testFile#" >

    <cfdump var="#sheetData#" label="Lots of empty cells" />