CFUNITED – The premier ColdFusion conference Another Look at Microsoft Office Using Apache Jakarta POI Jeremy Lund June 28th, 2006

About Me  Manager of the Web Resource Center University Health Care (Salt Lake City, Utah)  Sun Certified Java Programmer for the Java 2 platform  B.S., Computer Engineering from University of Utah

Goals  What is POI?  How do I install POI?  What benefits do I get from using POI?  What won't it do?  POI alternatives  Java tips  Lots of code examples

What is POI?

What is Apache Jakarta POI?  Poor Obfuscation Implementation  A set of APIs for interacting with OLE 2 Compound Document Format files Examples: Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), and PowerPoint (.ppt)

Why Use POI? Data Import/Export

Why Use POI? Content Management

Why Use POI? Reporting

In an Ideal World...

In the Real World...

What other tools?  Save as XML  Save as HTML  COM  OpenOffice.org 2.0 POI is just one more tool

Anatomy of an OLE2CDF File

POIFS: At the Core  POI file system (POIFS) is used to read and manipulate OLE2CDF files Package: org.apache.poi.poifs.filesystem  Two types of stream entries supported: DirectoryEntry DocumentEntry

POIFS Examples  Example: POIFSExample1.cfm  Example: POIFSExample2.cfm

How Do I Get to the Data?  APIs to interact with specific document types and streams  XLS files (HSSF)  PPT files (HSLF) 3.0 alpha  DOC files (HWPF) scratchpad  Document props (HPSF) (read-only)  final ships with CF 7  I am using 3.0 alpha for this presentation

How to Install  For release:  For 3.0 alpha:  Scratchpad is not included with CF 7  Stop CF services  Save in {cfwebroot}/WEB-INF/lib  Restart CF services

Quick Java-CF Review  To use Java classes: createObject() – loads the class  createObject(“java”,”fully.qualified.name”)  Can use for static method calls obj.init() - creates an instance of the class using the specified constructor

Java Tip #1  Know your casting tools!

Java Tip #1  Casting tools javaCast(type,cfVar)  boolean, int, long, float, double, string, null  Null only available in 7 Primitive wrapper classes  Array reflection classes  java.lang.reflect.Array  Call newInstance(class,int length)

Java Tip #2  Java reflection is your friend!

Java Tip #2  obj.getClass() gives you a reference to the class String value of name: obj.getClass().getName() Wrapper classes have a TYPE static variable to represent primitives.

org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel  Interface for reading and writing XLS files.  Mature and reliable  Basic class structure is similar to HTML table HSSFSheet = table HSSFRow = tr HSSFCell = td  Example: HSSFExample1.cfm

Add some style to the spreadsheet  HSSFCellStyle,HSSFFont  Can modify: Fonts (size and style) Colors Background Fills Borders Widths and heights  Example: HSSFExample2.cfm

Reading Spreadsheets  Similar to writing spreadsheets  Requires more care with datatypes!  Null  Example: HSSFExample3.cfm

org.apache.poi.hwpf  Interface for reading and writing Word (DOC) files.  In the scratchpad section of the library.  Has worked for what I have used it for (reading files), which is all I will talk about today.

Structure of a Word Document

HWPF Example 1  Example: HWPFExample1.cfm

HWPF Example 2  More meaningful text  Examples: HWPFExample2.cfm basicDocumentFacade.cfc

HWPF Example 3  Lists, Style  Examples: HWPFExample3.cfm advancedDocumentFacade.cfc

org.apache.poi.org.apache.poi.hslf  Interface for reading and writing PowerPoint (PPT) files.  Early, but very active development

HSLF Example 1  Simple Slideshow parser  Example: HSLFExample1.cfm

HSLF Example 2  Improved Slideshow parser XSLT  Example: HSLFExample2.cfm slideShowExtractor.cfc

Limitations  Available documentation  Images  Development activity

Resources    google “jakarta poi”

Thank you Jeremy Lund