Format data exported to Excel from JSP

[Piyush Jain]

We are currently using JSP to load data to an excel by setting the content type header in the JSP.

Inside the JSP we are just creating a regular HTML table with rows and columns which excel uses to populate cells.

What we really want to do is control the Page setup of the created excel for example changing the style of sheet from Potrait to Landscape etc.

Is this possible directly from JSP?

Thanks

[Bear Bibeault]

Originally posted by Piyush Jain:

Is this possible directly from JSP?

The real question is whether this is possible when importing HTML into Excel. It really has nothing to do with the JSP per se.

As such, this is actually an Excel question and I'm going to move it along to the General Computing forum.

[Bear Bibeault]

If you find that what you wish to do isn't possible by feeding Excel HTML (I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if you could), you'll probably need to explore the use of tools that generate Excel format rather than HTML.

[Andrew Eccleston]

I've had some success with such things by taking an Excel spreadsheet, formatting it the way I'd like it to look, and then saving it as HTML from Excel. Then, you can take the generated HTML, and use it to see what you need to output from your JSP. It's not exactly simple, and it doesn't let you do everything, but I've been able to produce some nice looking reports this way.

Hope this helps.

[Bear Giles]

I'm not sure I understand your question so this answer may not help. If you are trying to produce and return an actual Excel file:

- recent versions of Excel can use an XML format. I've seen examples in several JSP or Struts "cookbook" type books. It's what you expect -- you set the content-type in the page directive and then kick out XML instead of HTML.

- if you need to support an earlier version of Excel, you can use a library like Apache "POI". It's not JSP per-se, although I guess you could wrap it into a custom tag. With POI you create and populate a HSSFWorkbook, write it to a ByteArrayOutputStream, and then return that in your response with the appropriate content-type.

[Eric Gero]

http://www.codetoad.com/asp_excel.asp

This link may help, read down through all the comments for the full story. This works great in asp, but I have not tried it with a jsp yet. The idea is to create the spreadsheet in excel, then save it in html format. Open the html file that excel created and insert your code.

In asp, I just create a link that calls this "asp" page. It prompts the user to either open the file, or save it to their system.

Have you looked at the Jakarta POI project?

Hope this helps.
Eric

[ March 25, 2006: Message edited by: Eric Gero ]
[ March 25, 2006: Message edited by: Eric Gero ]