In many web-applications development, we come across the
requirement of importing data from tables present in database to excel sheets
and vice-versa. This is basically needed when we are migrating an already
existing application, where we would need the already existing data of the
application to be stored somewhere and then to be imported into database tables
of the new version of the application. Another scenario is when we provide the
end user of an web application to download some details or history, like
transaction history. In such cases, we can have the data saved to an excel
sheet. Though ColdFusion is a tag based language, and we have tags for
performing many complex functionalities without knowing any lower level details
for those, but there is no direct tag to perform the above operations. There
are many solutions to tackle the above issue. One of the easiest solution has
been provided by Ben Nadel, the POI Utility. The POI Utility is a ColdFusion
component that contains functions to read excel sheets into queries thus
making the data compatible with the ColdFusion, and to write database tables
data in the form of queries to excel sheets. This utility provides with the
flexibility to populate multiple worksheets of an excel sheet, thus allowing
the storage of all the required data in one excel sheet instead of multiple
excel sheets. Using this utility, its also possible to provide styling
specifications for the excel sheet data to be written from database table data.
To take all those advantages, we need to download the POI Utility into our
application. But what when we want to perform the above operations without
downloading the POI Utility? The answer to this question is that we have many
other alternatives to perform the above operations. Here I would be describing
some of the alternatives in detail.