Excel Library for C++ - XLSX I / O - cannot get it to work

Question

I am writing a program which involves the user populating an excel settings sheet.

I then read it and the values feed into the program.

There seem to be a few libraries out there for reading / writing xlsx files - I settled on XLSX I / O

I am quite a noob in programming and I cannot get it to work.

What I did was:
- Installed expat
- Installed zlib using cygwin command line
- Installed libzip using cygwin command line
- added ziplip to link libraries option in linker options
- added C:/Program Files (x86)/CodeBlocks/ to linker search directories
- copied dll / dll.a / .h files from include / bin directories in the downloadable to my correspondingly named mingw directories

I am using codeblocks with mingw

I am trying to run the example called example_xlsxio_read_cpp from ( https://github.com/brechtsanders/xlsxio )

The problems I ran into:
Compiler error - "error: no input files"
Not able to launch the .exe files - with error The file ziplib-4.dll is missing from your computer

My question is:
1. How to install the XLSX IO library correctly / how to get the example to compile?
2. What to do about the ziplib-4.dll file and where should it be?

Apologies in advance if the question seems noob, I am really new to programming

Answer 1

When linking to a DLL file you can check its dependancies using Dependancy Walker ( http://www.dependencywalker.com/ ), so you know which dependancies you need to have available. Those DLLs should be in the PATH when you link/run your application.

In this case you will need minizip or libzip (which in turn depends in zlib) and expat.

Also, the Windows binaries on the site now include DLLs that don't depend on any other DLLs.