Warning from Excel when opening Excel document in JSP

Question

Hi,
I populate a HSSFWorkbook with data retrieved from a database using user input. I then want to open the excel file up so the user can see it.
This works fine, but prior to the file opening I get a warning message from Excel saying that the file is of another format etc etc do you still want to open. It actually takes the name of the JSP page as the name of the file I want to open. The file opens if I ignore the warning.
I do the following when opening the file:
FacesContext facesContext = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
ExternalContext externalContext = facesContext.getExternalContext();
HttpServletResponse response = (HttpServletResponse) externalContext.getResponse();
ServletOutputStream out = null;
try {
// Initiate servlet response
response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
response.setHeader("Content-disposition", "inline;filename=\"" + excelSheet.getFile().getName() + "\""); //ExcelSheet getFile() returns java.io.File
out = response.getOutputStream();
excelSheet.getWb().write(out); //get HSSFWorkbook
// Finalize task.
out.flush();
} finally {
// Gently close stream.
close(out);
Any tips?

Answer 1

This would occur only in a certain widely used webbrowser developed by a team in Redmond. It completely ignores the filename part of the content disposition header, takes the part after the last slash of the URL as the actual file name, examines its extension against the platform specific list of file associations and in case of an unknown filetype it reads the content type header and gives a warning before when the content type is different.
To solve this problem, you need to append the filename as part of the URL. You can get some ideas out of this: [http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/07/fileservlet.html].
Its market coverage if fortunately shrinking, but until then we, developers, have to live with that product. It works perfectly in all other webbrowsers.