jXLS v1.0.6 is released
This is a minor bug fix release The following bugs were fixed
jXLS is a small and easy-to-use Java library for writing Excel files using XLS templates and reading data from Excel into Java objects using XML configuration.
Excel generation is required in many Java applications that have some kind of reporting functionality. The most complete library to manipulate XLS files from Java is Apache POI library. The problems appear when it is required to create a lot of custom and complex Excel reports with rich formatting and enhanced functionality.
In this case you have to write a great bunch of Java code for creating workbook with all required formatting, formulas and other specific settings and correctly export data from a set of Java objects. Such code is hard to debug and the task quite often becomes errorprone and timeconsuming. The other problem is that there are many Excel components for which there is no API provided.
Fortunately POI API allows to read Excel file trying to preserve it as is and then modify it as required. It is obvious it would be much easier to create all correctly formatted report template in some Excel editing tool and specify places where real data should appear.
jXLS is a project that implements this approach and allows creation of extremely complex Excel reports just in several lines of code. All you need is to create XLS template file with all required formatting, formulas, macros etc using specific notation to indicate placement of data and then write a couple lines of code to invoke jXLS engine passing XLS template and the exported data as parameters.
In addition to Excel generation functionality jXLS also contains jxls-reader module which provides a great help if you need to parse Excel files created in a predefined format to pull in the data. jXLS-reader allows you to describe parsing rules in a simple XML and all the other work on reading Excel file and population of your Java objects will be done automatically.