Question

I am trying to output an Excel file as the view in Spring Roo 1.0.2
What is the quickest way to do this?
(Do I have to add new mapping etc?) At the moment I am using the default Roo AjaxUrlBasedViewResolver.

Thanks

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s a specific “Roo” way of doing this, but Spring MVC does have an AbstractExcelView class that uses Apache POI and doesn’t cause any problems – I think it’s the best you can hope for.

First create a view class that extends AbstractExcelView and implements the buildExcelDocument method:

 import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.document.AbstractExcelView;

 public class XlsView  extends AbstractExcelView { 

   @Override
   protected void buildExcelDocument(
            Map<String, Object> model, HSSFWorkbook workbook, 
            HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
      //Apache POI code to set up the HSSFWorkbook goes here
      response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"file.xls\"");
    }
 }

Then add the following to your webmvc-config.xml. I don’t think the position matters, but I have it below the section where my TilesConfigurer is listed:

   <bean id="excelViewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.XmlViewResolver">
            <property name="order" value="1"/>
            <property name="location" value="/WEB-INF/views/views-excel.xml"/>
        </bean>

Finally create views-excel.xml with the following in it:

  <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop   http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd   http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd   http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-3.0.xsd   http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd">
     <bean name="XlsView" class="com.your.package.XlsView"/>
  </beans>