qmor / fastods

A very fast and lightweight (no dependency) library for creating ODS (Open Document Spreadsheet, mainly for Calc) files in Java. It's a Martin Schulz's SimpleODS fork

FastODS

(C) J. Férard 2016-2018

(C) M. Schulz 2008-2013 for SimpleODS

A very fast and lightweight (no dependency) library for creating ODS (Open Document Spreadsheet, mainly for Calc) files in Java. It's a Martin Schulz's SimpleODS fork.

Please note that FastODS is almost ready for production use. The version 1.0 is coming.

Ask a question: feel free to ask a question.

Table of contents

• Why FastODS?
• Limitations
• Installation
• Examples
• Speed
• History

Why FastODS?

Because I need to write big and simple ODS files very fast in Java.

There are some very good libraries for OASIS Open Document Format, like Simple ODF or JOpenDocument, but they are a little bit slow and cumberstone for only writing very simple spreadsheets. There is a simple and fast library by Martin Schulz, Simple ODS, but it is now discontinued, outdated (Java 1.3), has a few limitations (incorrect handling of UTF-8 encoding, missing XML escaping for attributes) and can be speed up.

FastODS is a fork of SimpleODS that aims to be a very fast ODS writing library in Java.

Limitations

FastODS won't deal with odt, odg, odf, or other od_ files. It won't even read ods files. Because it doesn't use XML internally, but only for writing files. That's why it is fast and lightweight.

It's an OpenDocument producer (Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2, 2.3.1) and only an OpenDocument producer:

An OpenDocument producer is a program that creates at least one conforming OpenDocument document

Installation

Standard

Add the following dependency to your POM:

<dependency>
		<groupId>com.github.jferard</groupId>
		<artifactId>fastods</artifactId>
		<version>0.6.0</version>
</dependency>

From sources

Type the following command:

git clone https://github.com/jferard/fastods.git

Then:

mvn clean install

It doesn't compile!

For reasons beyond my control, I'm stuck for this project with Java 6, and thus I need the tools.jar archive. If the default JRE on your computer is beyond version 9, maven won't find tools.jar. Here's a workaround for Linux:

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64" mvn clean install

On Windows, try (not tested):

cmd /C "set JAVA_HOME="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk..." mvn clean install"

From jar

First download the jar file from the latest release.

Then run the following command to install the jar in your local repo:

mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-install-plugin:2.5.2:install-file -Dfile=fastods-<version>.jar

Usage

In your POM, you'll have to include the following dependency:

<dependencies>
	...
	<dependency>
		<groupId>com.github.jferard</groupId>
		<artifactId>fastods</artifactId>
		<version>[set the version number here]</version>
	</dependency>
	...
</dependencies>

Examples

Basic example

final OdsFactory odsFactory = OdsFactory.create(Logger.getLogger("example"), Locale.US);
final AnonymousOdsFileWriter writer = odsFactory.createWriter();
final OdsDocument document = writer.document();
final Table table = document.addTable("test");

final TableCellStyle style = TableCellStyle.builder("green cell style").backgroundColor("#00ff00").build();
for (int y = 0; y < 50; y++) {
	final TableRow row = table.nextRow();
	final TableCellWalker cell = row.getWalker();
	for (int x = 0; x < 5; x++) {
		cell.setFloatValue(x*y);
		cell.setStyle(style);
		cell.next();
	}
}

writer.saveAs(new File("generated_files", "readme_example.ods"));

Other examples

Other examples are implemented as integration tests: OdsFileCreationIT.java, OdsFileWithHeaderAndFooterCreationIT.java, etc. The sources are quite simple.

To run those examples, one has to run:

mvn verify

The resulting ods files are written in current directory, and can be opened with LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

Speed

Let's be concrete : FastODS is approximately twice as fast as SimpleODS and ten times faster than JOpenDocument for writing large ODS files. (SimpleODF is clearly not the right tool to write large ODS files.)

For more details, see https://github.com/jferard/fastods/wiki/Benchmarking-and-profiling.

History

See https://github.com/jferard/fastods/releases