Question

Hello,

I want to build excel spreadsheet with servlet programming. I used tab-separated data for excel.

response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
PrintWriter out=response.getWriter();
out.println("\t\tFruits");
out.println("\tName\tPrice");
out.println("\tApples");
out.println("\tMangoes");

My query is that i want the title fruits to be in the center i mean i want to merge the cell. I want the output of Fruits from cell B2 to D2.What wld i have to update for merging the cell.
I know if we create a tabular data then it takes rowspan and colspan attribute but for this what to use??

Answer 1

If you want to produce a complete, fully compatibile Excel file you should use Apache POI and create that file with this library. It’s very easy to do – just take a look at the guides here.
And then you can use the code above to make a downloadable file for the user, i.e.:

public class Sample extends HttpServlet
{
   public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
      throws ServletException, IOException
   {
    OutputStream out = null;
    try
    {
     response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");

     response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=sampleName.xls");

     // Put your POI code here

    } catch (Exception e) {
     throw new ServletException("Exception in Excel Sample Servlet", e);
    } finally {
     if (out != null)
      out.close();
    }
   }
  }

There is a complete example of such servlet here

And if it can be XLSX file, you can use this example as well.

But if You still want to use CSV/TSV files, you can still easily do so.

byte[] csv = dao.getYourContentHere();
response.setContentType("text/csv");
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=data.csv"));
reponse.setContentLength(csv.length);
ServletOutputStream out = response.getOutputStream();
out.write(csv);

As one can see there is a difference in Content-Disposition section above.

BTW, if one wants to generate CSV data one can use a great little library from Ostermiller which will format the CSV/TSV file in the way that Excel will understand fully.