Question

I am writing a bit of code to read an excel file. At this point I am trying to determine the type of a cell.

    val wb:HSSFWorkbook= new HSSFWorkbook(fileInput)
    val sheet:HSSFSheet = wb.getSheetAt(0);
    val rows    = sheet.rowIterator()

    while(rows.hasNext()){
     var    row = rows.next()
    val cells = row.cellIterator()
    while(cells.hasNext()){
   val cell = cells.next()
   println(cell.getCellType()== org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC)}}     

It says

   value CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC is not a member of object org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFCell 

I dont understand why i cannot access this field. Could you please help on that.

regards

Answer 1

Scala treats static fields a bit different. In scala there are no static fields, so scala builds virtual objects for the static fields in java classes. As CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC is not defined on org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFCell but on org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Cell, you can’t access it from there, because inheritance is not taken into account on static members. You can access the field directly:

scala> org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Cell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC
res1: Int = 0

If inheritance was taken into account, this would lead to inconsistencies with how scala objects work. In scala a companion object does not inherit anything from the companion of the classes superclass.