It seems to me you're lost in a maze of abstract factory factory blueprints, all different.

Unless you specify a bit more concrete what kind of data you have and how it should be represented in general, you cannot get any meaningful answer.

A table has a traditionally well-defined structure. It consists of a grid layout, with the first row in the grid being called the "header", usually containing the names of the columns. Every subsequent row then contains values.

As soon as you find another data structure, like, say, a (directed) Graph, you will likely also find modules that will render the graph in a way more or less abstracted, into a sensible output format. For example, it makes little sense to render image data into the Excel file format, or tabular data into text wrapped to 40 character columns.

Looking for a generic way here will only bring you into the territory of XSLT or other meaningless abstract ways to manipulate data structures into other data structures. Most of these transformations amount to programming things yourself, which is why most people just program these transformations directly in Perl instead of looking for a crutch that limits their expressiveness.

In reply to Re: polymorphic data-driven rendering? by Corion
in thread polymorphic data-driven rendering? by metaperl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.