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254

Chapter 11 The JSP page Directive: Structuring Generated Servlets

Generating Excel Spreadsheets

You can create simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheets by specifying 

applica 

tion/vnd.ms excel

 as the content type and then formatting the spread 

sheet entries in one of two ways. 

One way to format the content is to put rows on separate lines of the docu 

ment and to use tabs between each of the columns. Listing 11.3 shows a sim 

ple example, and Figures 11 5 and 11 6 show the results of loading the page

in Netscape on a system with Excel installed. Of course, in a real application,

the entries would probably be generated dynamically, perhaps by a JSP

expression or scriptlet that refers to database values that were accessed with

JDBC (see Chapter 18). 

Listing 11.3 Excel.jsp 

<%@ page contentType="application/vnd.ms excel" %>

<%   Note that there are tabs, not spaces, between columns.   %>

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001 (Anticipated)

12.3

13.4

14.5

15.6

16.7

Figure 11 5 With the default browser settings, Netscape prompts you before allowing 

Excel content.

Second edition of this book: www.coreservlets.com; Sequel: www.moreservlets.com.

Servlet and JSP training courses by book's author: courses.coreservlets.com.