Re: poi/hssf capability question re: xls checkbox

[Nick Burch <ni...@torchbox.com>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, brent wrote:
> Does HSSF or POI, or perhaps the biff reader have any ability to dump 
> the checkboxe states in an excel .xls IF THEY ARE NOT LINKED to a cell?

My hunch is that the checkboxes will be escher records, in the main 
workbook stream. (There would normally be a link to them from the cells, 
but not in your case).

You'd probably want to use org.apache.poi.hssf.dev.BiffViewer and 
org.apache.poi.ddf.EscherDump to poke around in the file, and track these 
checkboxes down.

Once you've found them, I suspect you'll discover they are stored one per 
clump of escher records. Hopefully they'll be in order, but if not, the 
anchor details ought to let you figure out what order the records 
correspond to. Then, it'd be a case of writing some code to open the 
workbook, grab the records, find the checkboxes, and output their values


So, should be do-able, but you'll almost certainly need to dive into the 
record level code, and learn more about the file formats than you'd 
probably want to... at least there are now docs for much of it!
    http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx

Nick

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