Enabling generic export or print features with Seam

[chris.simons]

All,

Has anyone explored taking a generic data model (i.e. not knowing the columns and data elements at design time) and allowing it to be converted to Excel and/or printed?

What I would like to do is build a generic class for taking the contents of a data table (using RichFaces, to be exact) and allowing it to be natively opened to be printed or exported to Excel.

I've looked into POI and a few others; there seems to be quite a bit of work involved in getting this to work.  I'm curious if anyone has explored this kind of functionality and, if so, what recommendations you might have for implementation.

Thanks.

[www.supernovasoftware.com]

I would like this as well.

While the new excel support look really cool, it still requires that a page be made for each export AFAIK.

Something like http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/11/ would be quite useful.

[mcoffin]

The MyFaces Project has an ExportActionLister you could probably look in to.

[chris.simons]

Jason - that is exactly what I had in mind when I posted my message.  Thanks for following-up.

Mark - this seems promising.  Thank you for bringing it to my attention and it's great to receive some quick responses.

I'll be researching this project and will report back with my findings.

Thanks!

[chris.simons]

ExporterActonListener (formally exportToExcel?) seems to work only with standard JSF data tables.  It seems promising.

However, I guess I'm still looking for advice on proceeding from the DataModel standpoint rather than extracting HTML from a dataTable.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[nickarls]

Hmm, wonder if it would be possible to write a layer for the excel component that would dig out the datatable component, use the same binding for data access and translate the css into compatible layout instructions?

David? Or are you too busy watching the European Song Competition semi? ;-)

[chris.simons]

I like where you're going with this...

[nickarls]

Continued the discussion here

[nickarls]

I think it might be a good idea to have some general export functionality layer.

Say, we have a component that is called exporter. It would have a single method

public void export(String componentId, String format);

An implementation would then dig out the component based on the ID and render it how it seems fit. In that way you could get a csv dump of a commandButton or perhaps something even more useful.

There would be some pre-defined renderers (excel, csv, pdf, jpg) or then you could render your own (OK, add one method to exporter:

public void registerExporter(String format, String componentName);

This could be wrapped up in custom tag that would display a list of icons for the registered type (icon provided by implementation) or called separately through links etc wherever you need them.

Of course, client side state saving might be a problem(?)

Just brainstorming, someone more knowledgeable is free to join in.

[nickarls]

Created a JIRA for this.