Question

I’m trying to read excel contents in android, but always get file not found exception
The project is in:

C:\AndroidWorkSpace\AntenaProject

And the code is:

public void TestClick(View view)
{
    File inputWorkbook = new File("shidur.xls");
    Workbook w;
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("starting");
    try {

        w = Workbook.getWorkbook(inputWorkbook);
        // Get the first sheet
        Sheet sheet = w.getSheet(0);
        // Loop over first 10 column and lines

        for (int j = 0; j < sheet.getColumns(); j++) {
            for (int i = 0; i < sheet.getRows(); i++) {
                Cell cell = sheet.getCell(j, i);
                //CellType type = cell.getType();

                sb.append(cell.getContents());



            }
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }


    TextView tv = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.testText);
    tv.setText(sb.toString());


}

i tried to put shidur.xls in the following folders:

C:\AndroidWorkSpace\AntenaProject\res\raw
C:\AndroidWorkSpace\AntenaProject\res

but still getting this exception.
i’m using jxl.jar from http://jexcelapi.sourceforge.net/
thanks for the help

Answer 1

The path that you provide to the File constructor needs to be the absolute path of the file, or you need to use the overload that takes another File object as the first parameter which represents the directory the file lives in.

That being said, constructing a file in this way is for files that are either in local storage (ie. phone’s main memory) or external storage (ie. SD card).

To open a file from the res/raw directory, get an InputStream in the following way

    InputStream in = getResources().openRawResource(R.raw.file_name);

Then, you will need code that reads the contents of your input stream. I use a static helper method that looks like this, but this could run you into problems if the file is huge. Hasn’t happened to me yet, but in principle that’s always a risk when loading the entire content of a file into memory

public static String readStream(InputStream in)
{
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    String line = null;
    try
    {
        while((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
        {
            sb.append(line + "\n");
        }
    }
    catch(Exception ex) { }
    finally
    {
        // NOTE: you don't have my IOUtils class, 
        // but all these methods do is check for null and catch the exceptions that Closeable.close() can throw
        IOUtils.safeClose(in);
        IOUtils.safeClose(reader);
    }
    return sb.toString();
}