xlsdatasource Shows how the XLS data source implementation could be used to fill reports. How to fill a report using data from an XLS file. 3.6.1 Sanda Zaharia shertage@users.sourceforge.net XLS Data Sources

Report filling is one of the basic operations during the report generation. After the report compilation, report data are read from the report data source, and/or calculated from report expressions, and the generated report sections are filled one by one.
Data sources are very useful when data come as a set of structured records, either extracted from a relational database, or loaded from specific files. In order to become more familiar with data source objects please consult the Data Sources section.
When reporting data is stored in Microsoft Excel files (XLS), the ExcelDataSource data source implementation can be used to read it and feed it into the report.
The XLS data source uses the Apache POI library to load the XLS workbook and read from it. Instances of this data source can be created by supplying either an in-memory workbook object, a file, or an input stream to read the data from.
Report-field mapping for this data source implementation is very similar to the CSV data source field-mapping explained in the CSV Data Source sample. It works on the assumption that the workbook contains data in a tabular form (rows are records and columns contain report-field values). The main difference is that one can specify a given sheet to be used as single sheet data source using the XLS_SHEET_SELECTION parameter or report property.

XLS Data Source Example

In our example data records are stored in the /data/XlsDataSource.data.xls file. It contains the same records as in the CSV Data Source sample, but the city and id columns are separated by an empty column (ie. records contain in fact 6 fields, but the second field in each record is always empty).
There are no column headers in the .xls file. This means that column names are set independently, as shown in the getDataSource1() method in the /src/XlsDataSourceApp.java file:

Column names are the same as in the CSV example: city, id, name, address and state. But they are associated with particular column indexes: 0, 2, 3, 4, 5. The empty column's index (1) is skipped, and doing so, the empty content of the second column will be neglected.
The ExcelDataSource object prepared above is passed to the engine at fill time (see again the /src/XlsDataSourceApp.java file):

The IncludedStates parameter defined above is used for data filtering. Only records with Active or Trial states will be taken into account:

  <parameter name="IncludedStates" class="java.util.Set"/>

  ...

  <filterExpression><![CDATA[$P{IncludedStates}.contains($F{state}) ? Boolean.TRUE : Boolean.FALSE]]></filterExpression>

Running the Sample

Running the sample requires the Apache Ant library. Make sure that ant is already installed on your system (version 1.5 or later).
In a command prompt/terminal window set the current folder to demo/samples/xlsdatasource within the JasperReports source project and run the > ant test view command.
It will generate all supported document types containing the sample report in the demo/samples/xlsdatasource/build/reports directory.
Then the report will open in the JasperReports internal viewer.