UpdateCell-Command

Introduction

UpdateCell-Command allows you to customize the processing for a particular cell.

Command Attributes

The UpdateCell-Command has the following attributes

• updater is a name of the key in the context containing CellDataUpdater implementation

• lastCell is a common attribute for any command pointing to the last cell of the command area

The CellDataUpdater interface looks like this

public interface CellDataUpdater {
    void updateCellData(CellData cellData, CellRef targetCell, Context context);
}

Before transforming the area UpdateCell-Command will invoke the updateCellData method passing the current CellData, the target cell and the current context.

The implementation can update the CellData to set the required value for the cell.

For example the class below updates the total formula

class TotalCellUpdater implements CellDataUpdater{
    public void updateCellData(CellData cellData, CellRef targetCell, Context context) {
        if( cellData.isFormulaCell() && cellData.getFormula().equals("SUM(E2)")){
            String resultFormula = String.format("SUM(E2:E%d)", targetCell.getRow());
            cellData.setEvaluationResult(resultFormula);
        }
    }
}

The key line is cellData.setEvaluationResult(resultFormula) which updates the cell data with the target formula.

This can be useful for example in SXSSF processing where it is not possible to use the standard Jxls formula processing functionality.

See SxssfDemo.java as an Update Cell command example in org.jxls.examples.

Excel markup

To create UpdateCell Command in Excel template create a cell comment like this

jx:updateCell(lastCell="E4"  updater="totalCellUpdater")

The lastCell attribute defines the last cell of the command area.

The updater attribute is set to totalCellUpdater. The totalCellUpdater must be put into the context before the processing

    Context context = new Context();
    context.putVar("totalCellUpdater", new TotalCellUpdater());