Hello,
I need to be able to generate a Word document in my servlet. I've looked around but haven't found much that seems to do what I need. The most promising one seemed to be Apache's POI (
http://poi.apache.org/) but the Word part of it doesn't seem to be able to write Word documents the way I need it to.
Ideally, here's what I'd like to do: First I'd have a Word document that would act as a "template". It would look like the paper form we're replacing but would have some unique strings in each field where user would normally have written something.
In my servlet I would read in the "template" file and use the request parameters to replace the unique strings in the fields. Then I would write out the modified Word document to another file.
Seems simple enough but I'm not able to find anything that can do this. I would greatly appreciate any hints/suggestions on how to do this.
Actually, the final goal is to take the new Word file and generate a PDF out of it for future retention in our record retention software. That software only accepts PDFs. I chose Word as the intermediate format because it seemed to be the best way to generate a file that most closely resembled the paper form that's being replaced. If anyone has a better way to do this I'd love to hear it.
The main thing is that I'd like to use open source software to accomplish this. I don't think I can get approval to buy more software at this point.
Thanks in advance for any help!
David
