Hi -
I am helping to design a new application at my company. We're currently using
JBoss 5,
JSF 1.2, Richfaces 3.3.2. The application is to implement a web based application to replace a very large spreadsheet that my users have been using to manage their work. The spreadsheet has a large number of columns, about 90. For better or worse, they have gotten used to working with their data in Excel, they love Excel and are all really good using it.
I am trying to provide them with an efficient interface that allows them to quickly navigate through their data and view and update multiple rows & columns on one screen. I have too many columns to display on one screen. I can try to group them into tabs and make a big editable datatable, but I think this seems like a klunky interface; they would need to navigate from page to page and from tab to tab - I think this will drive them crazy. I can also export their data to Excel, let them manipulate the data in Excel and import it back in. They would be able to quickly update their data, but this seems like a bit of a hack and a possible validation nightmare when I read the data back in.
I've seen some ajax based spreadsheet type jsf components, but I don't have any experience with them.
Has anyone had a similar situation with their JSF app? What was your approach? I'm basically trying to provide them with a JSF solution that's as close to Excel as possible. This may be impractical, I'm not sure.
Any thoughts or feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.