More Resolver One nice-to-haves

Working on Resolver One stuff again, and came up with a few more things I'd like to see.

I've been having problems moving some of my IronPython code out of my worksheet and into an IronPython module, but I assume that's due to my own lack of understanding of the clr - the external libraries seem to get hung up on the import statements and not get any further.

Which leads me to my first request: enable an easy way to reload a workbook. At the moment, any time I make a change in an external file, I have to close the entire workbook and re-open it. I can't just recalculate and have it re-import the module, I have to close the workbook (which generally means the entire program) and re-open it. It would be nice to have a way to "Reload from disk" or something similar that does a thorough reinitialization of the environment.

The second thing is something I just posted about on the Resolver forums, so I'm hopeful that I'll come upon a solution via that line of inquiry, but basically, I want SSL support in Resolver. I was trying to connect to a gmail server and use starttls() from smtplib, but couldn't do it because of the lack of SSL support in IronPython 2.6.0, which I believe is what's under the hood in Resolver One.

I'm using Resolver for a couple projects now, so here's hoping that development continues and that I can see some of these things working in the future.

More notes on Resolver One

Still generally liking Resolver One, but there are some limitations that are bothering me and associated requests I'd like to make.

1) Sorting!

How is there no sorting in place yet? They implemented CHITEST before sorting-in-place!?

2) Assignment

Some more "magic" assignment methods would be welcome. Something like

myCellRange = myListOfLists # aka 2D array

or

myRow = myList

That seems like a straightforward thing to implement, but instead I have to iterate over both and assign each value manually.

3) Row and Column Numbers

It would be very helpful if the code editor had a display with row and column numbers at the bottom.

Resolver One CellRange oddities

I've started working on a project in which we're using Resolver One as a dashboard. The workbook consumes multiple data sources (services, DB, YAML files, etc.), collates and formats, and may eventually do other cool stuff like kick off simulations or generate charts. But we're still in the early stages, so I'm just fleshing out the configuration routines and table displays.

What I've found so far is that Resolver One is a cool package, but seems to have some weak points. The documentation is okay, but the layout seems less than intuitive, and the volume of documentation is somewhat lacking in comparison to The Enterprise Spreadsheet app. That's to be expected, so it doesn't bother me much.

The thing that does bother me is an apparent code deficiency in combination with my inability to log into their support forums to ask questions. I assume the forum issue is temporary and will be resolved (ha) shortly, but the code issue seems like a bug.

Basically, my problem is that CellRanges don't act Pythonically, or even correctly, it would seem. For one, you can't do this:

cellrange.HeaderRow = worksheet.HeaderRow

Why not? That seems like the most logical (and Pythonic) operation you could perform. I actually couldn't set the HeaderRow through any means, no matter what sort of value I passed in.

I had a second issue, but I just determined that it was user error and fixed it. Will continue this post if I come across something else...