Feature request: Allow identifying formats by name

Today, when dealing with complex an multiple formats, I use the following piece of code to be able to retrieve them at the time to write data :

def register_formats(wb, d):
    return {k: wb.add_format(v) if v is not None else v for k, v in d.items()}

#my_formats d parameter simplified for readability sake
my_formats = register_formats(workbook, {
        'error':  {'bg_color': '#cc0000'},
        'warning': {'bg_color': '#ffff00'},
        'ok': None})

# Much farther in the program ...

ws = wb.add_worksheet()
ws.write(0,0,"text", my_formats['error'])

but then one has to pass this my_format dictionary around.

I suggest to extend the workbook interface with an optional ref parameter, and then in the write functions be able to give the reference of the format rather than the format itself. It would result in something like :

wb.add_format({'bg_color': '#cc0000'}, ref="error")

#####

ws.write(0,0,"text", format_ref="error")

I can propose an implementation if that helps.

[jmcnamara]

I’m going to leave the discussion of #111 to that thread.

For this feature a straight forward interface (and implemention) would be to add a user definable name field to the format object that would allow you to do this:

my_format = workbook.add_format({'name': 'error',
                                 'bold': True,  
                                 'font_color': 'red'})

# ...
error_format = workbook.get_format_by_name('error')

worksheet.write('A2', 'Hello', error_format)

Would that meet the needs of the 1+ers?

There are a couple of internal gottas that I would have to workaround but it would be doable.

The second part about adding a ref parameter to all the write_*() functions, I’m not keen on. It would just complicate the interface, docs and testing.

P.S. get_format() would probably be a better method name and as an aside get_worksheet_by_name() should probably been called get_worksheet() (the _by_name() part is implied and a little long).

[jmcnamara]

I’m going through some older feature requests into XlsxWriter and closing out ones that I am unlikely to work on in the near future. This is one of them unfortunately.