OpenRules Release 5.2 provides an important update for the underlying Apache POI software.  On October-2008 Apache announced its latest release of Apache POI 3.2 FINAL, a Java API to access Microsoft format files. There have been many important bug fixes since the POI 3.0 release and a lot of new features. POI 3.2 is a pre-release for POI 3.5 that is currently in beta and that will support the new Office Open XML file formats, such as XLSX, which were introduced in MS Office 2007.

OpenRules uses the POI Java API to access Excel files. POI 3.2 has deprecated or completely removed some important classes and methods that were utilized by OpenRules. This fact forced OpenRules to changed its own interface with POI.

From the installation perspective, the new OpenRules Release 5.2 changes only two jar-files in the configuration project "openrules.config":

1. openrules.all.jar

2. poi-3.2-FINAL-20081029.jar (instead of poi-3.0.1-FINAL-20070705.jar)

We plan to switch to the POI 3.5 and support Office 2007 Excel files as soon as the POI 3.5 becomes final.