Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow

Excel

Spring supports two libraries for generating Excel spreadsheets as views: the Jakarta POI

library and JExcel. Both are used in exactly the same way other than the choice of JAR file that

you add to your WEB-INF/libdirectory in the deployed application and the actual manner of

manipulating the workbook in Java. We’ll look at an example of how to use the POI library

here.

Creating the Template

Creating an Excel spreadsheet is best done from a template, having your model values update

certain cells within that template, which will perhaps be the subject of charts or formulae

already built in to the XLS template file. Merging your model with the template is done in the

same way as we’ve seen for XSLT and PDF Views—by coding a concrete extension to a Spring

provided abstract class.

Figure 8-9 displays the template file that we’ve created for the basis for our view. Model

data will be used to update this template, providing a nicely formatted view to our users. We’ll

store this template in our WAR file at WEB-INF/excel/home.xls.

Figure 8-9.Excel template used to display flights

258 CHAPTER 8 ■SUPPORTED VIEW TYPES