JSF: how to export UIData in Excel [ActionComponent]

Since I bore a lot of people in Apache myfaces mailing list with my newbbie questions I give this back to the word... hoping that it would be of some use for someone else.

This is my action bean that store the content of a uidata component in a excel file.

It needs POI (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi) v 2.0 in che classpath.

1 add the bean and the util class to your project

2 add the mappings to the faces-config.xml

 <managed-bean>
        <managed-bean-name>excelManager</managed-bean-name>
        <managed-bean-class>com.kyub.jsf.excelaction.ExcelManagerBean</managed-bean-class>
        <managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
        <managed-property><property-name>fileCache</property-name>
            <value>/Users/sammyrulez/IdeaProjects/Faces/exploded/</value>
          </managed-property><managed-property>
              <property-name>templateFileName</property-name>
              <value>/Users/sammyrulez/IdeaProjects/Faces/workbook.xls</value>
        </managed-property>
         <managed-property>
            <property-name>sheet</property-name>
            <value>0</value>
        </managed-property>
        <managed-property>
            <property-name>rowOffset</property-name>
            <value>3</value>
        </managed-property>


        </managed-bean>

ok properties meaning:

• fileCache: where excel file are cached
  
  
• templateFileName: excel file to use as a template: it could be an empty excel file, but it must be a valid excel 97/2000 ecc spreadsheet
  
  
• sheet: sheet where to write data (number zero based)
  
  
• rowOffset: row from where start writing data (number zero based)
  

3 add navigation .. here my example with a jsp displainig the link to the file...

<navigation-case>
       <from-outcome>excel</from-outcome> <!-- excel is the outcome of my action! -->
       <to-view-id>/excel.jsp</to-view-id><redirect />
   </navigation-case>

4 add a command link to the footer (or header) facet of your dataTable

 <f:facet name="footer">
                <h:commandLink actionListener="#{excelManager.listenTable}" action="#{excelManager.exportData}"   >
                    <f:param name="properties" value="name,password"/>
                    <f:param name="headers" value="Nome,Password"/>
                    <f:param name="filename" value="rapportino_excel.xls"/>
                    <h:outputText value="export in excel"/>
                </h:commandLink>
 </f:facet>

• "properies" are the properties of the enclosed collection which is the value attribute of your dataTable you want to display in the column. (things like order.customer.name should work!)
  
  
• "headers" are the header of each column
  
  
• "filename" is the fixed part of the name of the output file. A time stamp and the dataTable id will be added.
  

I will make a consistent package if I will have the time this week with a decent "readme"


source code here http://www.kyub.com/ExcelManagerBean.java and here http://www.kyub.com/ReflectionUtil.java