Excel export with apache POI driving me crazy

Question

using smartgwt on tomcat running on openjdk on debian squeeze.

I have a grid on my site which you can excel-export. It transfers to server and it exports the data using Apache POI. You then get a popup in the browser so that you can save the excel file.

When running Tomcat locally, all works fine - however on my debian server, the Excel file looks empty when i open it. It IS not empty since if i save it as CSV i can see the data. MY colleague opened it on his phone and could look at the data. However in Excel 11 on Mac or Windows the file appears blank...

I think it has something to do with the Fonts installed on the server, so i have installed the "ttf-mscorefonts-installer" package that contains the Microsoft truetype fonts via apt-get, but still no success. I've tried copying fonts, using both XSL and OOXSL, but to no avail.

has anyone had any experience with this? I feel like i've tried everything now.

Answer 1

For others: This was caused by certain fonts not being available in OpenJDK, without any errors being logged anywhere.

I switched to Sun's JDK on my Debian as well, and the Excel files now open and display properly.