[Bug Report]: formatN should not output "0" when no input is provided

Environment Carbone Version: 2.1.0 Node Version: 10.20.1 Desktop OS: Debian Stretch LibreOffice: 6.1.5.2

Expected Behaviour

null:formatN() xml output should be an empty string

Actual Behaviour

null:formatN() output “0”

Steps to reproduce

Try to format null or undefined:

null:formatN()

Other comments

Is there a workaround? I am playing with Conditioned output but I can’t make it work.

{$my_number:ifEmpty()} // OK: value is not printed if null 
{$my_number:ifEmpty():formatN()} // KO: '0' is printed if null

[Toub]

Thanks for your reply.

I switch back to exceljs for complex spreedsheet generation.

But I will give an other try to carboneJS soon in order to provide to my applications users a simple way customize basic non-spreadsheet documents templates.

[steevepay]

Hello @Toub, sorry for the delay! After discussing with the team, we got the same problem internally. Our main priority is to improve the XLSX report generation and then we will be able to fix this issue. In the meantime, you can take a look at the preprocessing process where the formatN is behaving differently than other formatters for ODS/XLSX files: https://github.com/Ideolys/carbone/blob/37355e9e789320a5d50013ec94be50092e33b9e6/lib/preprocessor.js#L212 If a formatN formatter is found, the string cell is converted to a number cell. As it is a preprocessing function, this stage doesn’t know if the injected value exists. To fix the issue, the cell conversion should be done during or after the building process.