Surrounding Box Border in Axlsx

boxed_border.rb

require 'axlsx'
p = Axlsx::Package.new
p.workbook do |wb|
 
  # Stuff like this is why I LOVE RUBY
  # If you dont know about hash default values
  # LEARN IT! LIVE IT! LOVE IT!
  defaults =  { :style => :thick, :color => "000000" }
  borders = Hash.new do |hash, key|
    hash[key] = wb.styles.add_style :border => defaults.merge( { :edges => key.to_s.split('_').map(&:to_sym) } ) 
  end
  top_row =  [0, borders[:top_left], borders[:top], borders[:top], borders[:top_right]]
  middle_row = [0, borders[:left], nil, nil, borders[:right]]
  bottom_row = [0, borders[:bottom_left], borders[:bottom], borders[:bottom], borders[:bottom_right]]

  wb.add_worksheet(:name => "Boxed Border") do |ws|
    ws.add_row []
    ws.add_row ['', 1,2,3,4], :style => top_row
    ws.add_row ['', 5,6,7,8], :style => middle_row
    ws.add_row ['', 9, 10, 11, 12]

    #This works too!
    ws.rows.last.style = bottom_row
  end
end
p.serialize 'boxed_border.xlsx'

For this use case, I would define the following styles:

top_left, top, top_right, right, bottom_right, bottom, bottom_left, left

and apply them as I needed. I know this is a PITA!
Style in Office Open XML is really way too much work.
It is very sad that they could not learn from CSS when they designed the spec.

Inheriting styles would simply this so much.....

If you are looking to add some functionality to the library, there are a couple of things you are going to want to be sure to understand.

1. Style is an integer value defined on each cell.
2. That integer value looks up one (and only one) xf record from Style#xfs
3. Incremental styles are possible with dxf records

There is a pretty steep learning curve here, so in addition to understanding the spec, I find it helpful to unzip a saved file from excel that gives me the results I want, and analyze that to see how MS solved the problem.