Exposing Excel as a Webservice

[Brandon]

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately I cannot use a different format for the data since I'm
really using Excel as a calculation engine.  I don't own the authoring
of these spreadsheets or even the data inside of them so I cannot
change the format.  The spreadsheets also are complicated enough and
change frequently enough that it's not feasible for me to try to
extract the logic and data inside of them into a different calculation
engine (unless there's some existing tool which will do this for me?).
My program is just one user of the spreadsheets among hundreds of human
users.  Unfortunately what's easy for the humans is always going to win
out over what's easy for my program.

My concern with my option 2) is that I appear to be experiencing some
level of contamination between calls that I can't resolve.  It's not
truly transactional in that a call into the system guarantees that it
will leave everything how it found it.  That's sort of why I thought up
option 3).  Let the OS help me somewhat to clean up.  I strongly
suspect that my option 2) is to some extent at the mercy of the python
garbage collector.  I'm not positive of that though.


Thanks,
Brandon