Create and write text to the word document table using Apache POI in Java

In previous posts I explained how we can use Apache POI to read the text from word documents. It is the time to dwell into the writing of word documents using Java. You may get doubt  why to write word documents from Java(we can directly use word to write). But in so  many scenarios we directly work with data bases and some times we have to take the reports from database for further processing.

The database nothing more than tables in an organised and inter linked manner for easy retrieval of data. We can store that data into xls or we can use word tables to store for further use.

In this post I will explain how to write the tables in word document, how to create new rows, cells and putting data in the cells.

We are writing means we need one output stream to write to the disk. Obviously FileOutputStream comes handy. we will create object for FileOutputStream. Do not forget to catch the exceptions otherwise wisely throw them JVM is there to take care. But is is not good always to throw the exceptions.

FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("")

The next step is to create object for the word document. This is pretty straight forward just create object of type XWPFDocument.

XWPFDocument doc = new XWPFDocument()

All the thing(data) what we are going to write into above object will be part of our final word document which will be available after the finishing of our program(Java).

The next thing we have to do is to create table in word document to write the data into the cell. There are three steps we have to do sequentially to write the data to the table are creating the table in the XWPFDocument object, creating  row in that table and creating cell in the row to put the text.

XWPFTable table = doc.createTable()
XWPFTableRow row = table.getRow(0)

You may wonder how we can get the row with out creating it. One thing I want to make sure is that the table which we created will have default row. Just we are sing it as the table header row where we will keep all our columns headings. Now we are headed toward creating the cell in the row but not the first one as I said the default first row already has one for us.

The next step is creating one more cell if we want this looks like

XWPFTableCell cell1 = row.createCell()

if we want to set the text we can use

cell1.setText("")

After that based on our demand we can create as many rows as we need just be creating the row in the XWPFDocument object. One thing we have to be clear is we have to create the cells in the very first row only after that there is no need. Because the cells will be create automatically for us in the newly created rows of the table.

We have to get those cells and need to put the text.

The code snippet which will get you going will be

fos = new FileOutputStream("D:/POI/tableTest.docx");
            doc = new XWPFDocument();
            XWPFTable table = doc.createTable();
            XWPFTableRow row = table.getRow(0);
            row.getCell(0).setText("Name");
            XWPFTableCell cell1 = row.createCell();
            cell1.setText("Age");
            XWPFTableCell cell2 = row.createCell();
            cell2.setText("UID");
            for (int rows = 0; rows < 2 ; rows++ )
            {
                row = table.createRow();
                for (XWPFTableCell cell : row.getTableCells())
                {
                    cell.setText(" ");
                }
            }
            doc.write(fos);
            fos.close();

Do not forget to write the document by suing the line
            doc.write(fos)
The argument is just the object of FileOutPutStream which we have create earlier. The good way to end the logic is just by closing the all opened connections especially streams.

Reading table from word document with multiple paras in cell with Apache POI

In previous post I explained about the reading of text from table having only one paragraph. But always this is not the case. Lot of documents daily we are processing has multiple paragraphs in cell. By using the method described in earlier we will get all the text from the cell. But we will miss the formatting of the paragraphs. If we want to get the individual paragraphs from the cell we can use the below line of code.

for ( XWPFParagraph para : cell.getParagraphs() )
{
}

The above for loop will give the one para at every iteration from the cell in the order they are typed in table cell.

The consolidated code to get all the text from the table with paragraphs is

fis = new FileInputStream("D:/POI/ex1.docx");
            doc = new XWPFDocument(fis);
            tables = doc.getTables();
            for ( XWPFTable table : tables )
            {
                for ( XWPFTableRow row : table.getRows() )
                {
                    for ( XWPFTableCell cell : row.getTableCells() )
                    {
                            for ( XWPFParagraph para : cell.getParagraphs() )
                            {
                                    System.out.println(para.getText());
                            }
                    }
                    System.out.println("");
                }
            }

Reading table data from word document with Apache POI frame work

In previous posts reading word document I explained how we can use POI frame work to read the plain text data from the word document. Always this is not the case some times we may encounter tables in the document.
POI frame work has the built in support to read the tables data. It is so nice that we can read the data row by row and cell by cell. Java collection framework made it so easy to iterate over the table. Irrespective of the number of tables in the word document we can process the word document.
It is so simple to write Java code for reading the tables data. we want to read the table from word document so we need one input stream to open the word document for us. The Java code to accomplish this will look like

FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("")

After getting the data stream we need to use this in POI frame work. Just get the word document object in Java code by creating the object of XWPFDocument by passing the object of FileInputStream as the argument of the XWPFDocument constructor.

We will get the object of the word document. The following LOC will do this

XWPFDocument doc = new XWPFDocument(fis)

The object supports lot of methods to work on word document. In this post I will explain how to use this object to get the data present in the table. It is so simple by using the getTables method on the XWPFDocument object we will get all the tables of the word document which we are loaded in FileInputStream. This implies that we need one collection to hold all the tables. In fact the getTables method will return the List of the tables. This look like

List<XWPFTable>  tables = doc.getTables()

After getting the list of tables it is easy for us to iterate through all the tables of the word document. You may get doubt the size of the tables in the document may vary then how we can iterate with simple loop. It is so easy we are no where hard coding the number of columns or the number of rows of the table.

Every table object has the methods to get the number of rows and columns of the table. We can use Java for all loop to achieve this easily. The code to iterate through the tables look like

for ( XWPFTable table : tables )
{
} 

The code inside the above for loop can use table(one table returned by the for loop from the list) as the object pointing the real table in word document. This table object has so many methods one is to get the number of rows of the table

for ( XWPFTableRow row : table.getRows() )
{
}

we can use row the local variable of the above for loop to get cell and in turn to get the data present in that cell.

for ( XWPFTableCell cell : row.getTableCells() )
{
   System.out.print(cell.getText());
}

The method getText will return the text data by removing any formatting of the text.
The following code snippet is useful for reading and printing the table data as table on the Java console.
fis = new FileInputStream("D:/POI/ex1.docx");
            doc = new XWPFDocument(fis);
            tables = doc.getTables();
            for ( XWPFTable table : tables )
            {
                for ( XWPFTableRow row : table.getRows() )
                {
                    for ( XWPFTableCell cell : row.getTableCells() )
                    {
                        System.out.print(cell.getText());
                        System.out.print("\t");
                    }
                    System.out.println("");
                }
            }
It looks like so simple but we have one problem in  this code that is the formatting of the data is lost. And the cell may contain multiple paragraphs and tables as well we will see how to get the data with out lose of formatting in the next post.