Sorting a Excel file using java

[kandan]

Hi,

My Requirement is... I have a dataset(Excel) file residing in mainframe and I have to get the file, Sort the columns(more than one) and then place the file into different path.
All I need to know is How can I sort the columns in the excel file using Java.

Thanks in Advance
Kandan.

[JamesOfOOST]

Hi Kandan,

Basically, this is no easy task. I believe that you can use JDBC to connect to the Excel sheet. Create a User Data Source in the ODBC to point to the Excel Spreadsheet. You should be able to connect to the spreadsheet as you would a database. Keep in mind that the SQL Query will be a little different as (I beleive) that you have to enter the worksheet name in square braces ( i.e. [Sheet1]ColumnName ) but check on this before trying.

Also keep in mind that since you are trying to link a Java program to an Excel spreadsheet, and Excel has no direct support for Java, that there will probably be some rather interesting problems along the way.

But have a look for JDBC and Excel on a search engine, and this should get you started.

Cheers,

James D.

[ractoc]

You can also read in the excel file through the jexcel api (http://www.andykhan.com/jexcelapi/)
once you can read in the entire excel file into java, you can create your own Java object structure and go from there.

[stevensegers]

To my knowledge the most popular API for manipulating Excel files is Apache POI (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi). This is an API for reading office-documents in general. For reading Excel there is the hssf subproject (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/hssf). They also have a list of alternative projects that can be used for accessing Excel files (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/hssf/alternatives.html)

Good luck

Steven

[sjalle]

And for yet another solution, you could use the copy/paste java api and copy the
excel buffer directly into your app,... no a very dynamic solution but it works.

Then of course there is the neanderthal method of saving the excel as a
tab-delimited text file

[talk2hao]

Using a Java-COM Bridge like J-Integra for COM, you can easily access/modify MS Excel from Java client. You can find more information about it at http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com

J-Integra for COM's pure Java runtime talks to COM components using Distributed COM (DCOM) layered over Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). The RPCs are themselves layered on TCP/IP. Therefore, at the lowest level, J-Integra for COM uses standard Java networking classes.

Here's an very simple example to show you how easy to access Excel from Java client:
http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/suppo...l_example.html

Cheers,

Hao Zhang

J-Integra Interoperability Solutions
http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/
high performance interop middleware for java, corba, com & .net