Question

I export an Excel document with DisplayTag. It saves as a .xls file to my Desktop. When I open it with Excel, this error displays:

“The file you are trying to open, ‘filename.xls’, is in a different format than specified by the file extension. Verify that the file is not corrupted and is from a trusted source before opening the file.”

If I click “Yes”, it displays just fine in Excel. If I open this with Textpad, I see that it’s a binary file, but it appears to just be “.” delimited strings.

Any ideas what I might have done wrong, or how next to debug this?

edit::

If I change the extension to .txt, it’s not a binary file; it’s simply a list of delimited strings.

Answer 1

The default export class for Excel was set to the CSV class, but giving it the .xls extension. Changing displaytag.properties was the key here, something like:

export.types=csv excel xml rtf pdf 
export.excel=true
export.xml=true
export.csv=true
export.rtf=false
export.pdf=false
export.excel.class=org.displaytag.export.excel.DefaultHssfExportView
export.pdf.class=org.displaytag.export.DefaultPdfExportView
export.rtf.class=org.displaytag.export.DefaultRtfExportView
export.excel.filename=data.xls
export.pdf.filename=data.pdf
export.xml.filename=data.xml
export.csv.filename=data.csv
export.rtf.filename=data.rtf