Consider switching from rap2hpoutre/fast-excel to spatie/simple-excel

[trevorgehman]

• Laravel Version: 9.19.0
• Nova Version: 4.8.0
• PHP Version: 8.1.2
• Database Driver & Version: MySQL 8.0.28

Description:

rap2hpoutre/fast-excel depends on box/spout which is no longer maintained.

A possible easy switch would be to use spatie/simple-excel which has been updated recently to use the community fork of box/spout which is openspout/openspout.

[crynobone]

There few major reason why we not yet migrated to spatie/simple-excel, mainly:

1. Spatie has been aggressive with only supporting the latest PHP version, To use it with Nova 4 we need to use ^1.2.3|^2.0 and use only features that are available for all the compatible versions.
   • Only 2.0.0 and above uses openspout/openspout, any projects running on Laravel 8 with PHP 7.x on Nova 4 would still depends on box/spout.
2. While the Reader support LazyCollection, the Writer doesn't and this would increase memory usage and execution time when exporting a large dataset. I would assume you would see a similar result to Laravel Nova Export.

[tonyyb]

Hello @crynobone ,

Thanks for this discussion.

rap2hpoutre/fast-excel use "openspout/openspout": "^3" and doesn't seem very active to review PR like it : rap2hpoutre/fast-excel#294

It is a big problem because we can't use Nova with Livewire Powegrid.

Have you thought about integrating the features of fast excel to avoid these limitations ? I think it's risky to depend of a repository that seems not very active (60 issues, 12 PR...).

Thank you !

[crynobone]

We not moving to alternative implementation I have already explain the reason.