In several projects we are faced with the request to export data to a spreadsheet (mostly excel) or build a document for ms-word. So our development team requested the following: “Build an extension that helps us generate word documents or export datasets to spreadsheets”.
After some research, I found a project called Apache POI.
Apache POI covers all the stories, which we try to implement. So let’s begin with the first story: “Generating a new ms-word document”.
The story is very simple, but also very powerful. In our example the starting point is a document like the OpenNTF Contributor License Agreement. This document is needed for a company to contribute code to OpenNTF. Typically, this document has some lines (fields), which you have to fill in with your values. Let’s try to automate this process. We will build a form in the XPages application, where you can fill in your company name, address and other things. Then we modify the standard OpenNTF form a little bit, as you can see on the screenshot below:
In your XPages form we implement the new POI Document element and then we do some wiring:
- We define where the modified OpenNTF Licence Agreement is. This could be a file resource in the application, or a document accessible via view and a predefined key.
- Defining “Bookmarks”:
As you see on the word document, we have defined several “<<NAME OF BOOKMARK>>” tags in the text. This text must be in the same style, so they are in the same “run” Element on the document. - In our “POI Document” – Control could we now define a bookmark for each <<…>> element, which contains the name and a value.
- As you see, the value can be computed (so a binding to a viewScope variable is possible)
- We define a “download” button and connect the onClick event on a new action called “Generate Document”
The user can now fill in their values on the page and generate a customized word document. Developers are able to build in applications to produce customized documents in a very short time.
In the next blog entries, we will show you how we have build an extension of this function.
guedebyte 