What are the best practices for rendering excel sheet reports in Java?

Question

I have a need to generate an excel sheet report which looks like the following template --

I know this can be done using libraries like JExcelApi and Apache POI. However I would like to know if there are means of accomplishing this by writing a template similar to writing Apache Velocity templates for sending emails.

If there is a standard, good-practice approach for generating such reports what is it?

Answer 1

Why not create a styled template using Excel? Use placeholders (like ${name.of.field}) for the values that should be substituted, but otherwise style everything as required. Use a different placeholder to mark the end-of-template (this will allow you to write comments or other data beyond this space, to document your template).

Then, either via JExcelApi or Apache POI,

• open the template file, and locate the end-of-template marker.
• open the target file
• for each record, copy fields from the template, substituting ${xyz}-values for their actual contents and stopping once you reach your end-of-template marker.
• close target & template

Template modification will be extremely easy. The only problem is keeping the field-names in sync.