Core JFC Java Foundation Classes 2nd edition - Read

Customized Table Rendering and Editing 1421
your read Core Java 2Volume 2:Advanced Features by Cay Horstmann
and Gary Cornell, which covers this topic in detail.
Of course, unless you happen to be designing or implementing both the
source and target application, you probably don't have much choice as far as
data representation is concerned, because the other application will only be
able to handle a limited range of formats. As far as exchanging data with
Microsoft Excel is concerned, the following factors have to be taken into
account:
1. Whichever way you are moving the data, it will have to go via
the system clipboard. The AWT contains support for moving
information between the system clipboard and a Java application.
However, the implementation only allows you to transfer
data encoded as strings. Although you can work around this
restriction to encode more general data (such as images) as
strings for the purposes of exporting them to the clipboard, this
approach only works if the target application understands how
to decode them from this form.
2. Microsoft Excel supports a limited range of formats for data
import from the clipboard. In particular, it will accept a value
encoded as a string and install its content into a worksheet, provided
that the row and column boundaries are properly delimited.
Because of these restrictions, we are only going to be able to take string data
from a JTable and copy it to Microsoft Excel and vice versa. However, this is
not as restrictive as it sounds because quite a lot of non-string data, such as
integers, floating point numbers, and dates, have a natural string representation
that can be used for transfer and which is recognized by Microsoft Excel
and, with a little extra work, you can add code to your table to convert the
strings that you receive back into the original objects. Therefore, although
the primary focus of the example that you'll see here is to establish the basic
mechanism required to transfer strings, we'll build enough flexibility into it
so that you can easily extend it (by subclassing) for more specific needs.
The format used by Microsoft Excel to transfer data in string form is a simple
one: