Apache-POI: Unable to write to an existing workbook

Question

I'm working on a project which needs to read an Excel Workbook, calls the necessary Web Services, and then takes the response from the webservices and enters that information in to the same Excel Workbook that was read.

Here is the error I'm seeing when trying to write to the Excel Workbook:

Exception in thread "main" org.apache.poi.POIXMLException: java.io.IOException: Can't obtain the input stream from /docProps/app.xml
at org.apache.poi.POIXMLDocument.getProperties(POIXMLDocument.java:141)
at org.apache.poi.POIXMLDocument.write(POIXMLDocument.java:177)
at ext.ExcelProcessor.main(ExcelProcessor.java:197)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Can't obtain the input stream from /docProps/app.xml
    at org.apache.poi.openxml4j.opc.PackagePart.getInputStream(PackagePart.java:500)
    at org.apache.poi.POIXMLProperties.<init>(POIXMLProperties.java:75)
    at org.apache.poi.POIXMLDocument.getProperties(POIXMLDocument.java:139)
    ... 2 more

Here is my code for the opening of the file/reading:

pkg = OPCPackage.open(xslFile);
    theWorkbook = new XSSFWorkbook(pkg);

After this I read each row and extract each cell value.

Once this is done I'll create the cells under the headers for Success and Result Message and then do the following:

String sessionData = sessionKey[1];
                String[] cellValCurrRow = rowCellVals.get(r-1);
                String attachmentData[] = WQSServices.uploadAttachment(sessionData, cellValCurrRow);

                XSSFCell cell = xslRows[r].getCell(7);

                if(cell == null)
                {
                    cell = xslRows[r].createCell(7);
                }

                System.out.println("The Cell: "+cell.getStringCellValue());

                XSSFCell cell2 = xslRows[r].getCell(8);

                if(cell2 == null)
                {
                    cell2 = xslRows[r].createCell(8);
                }

                System.out.println("The Cell: "+cell2.getStringCellValue());

                cell.setCellType(Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING);
                cell2.setCellType(Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING);
                cell.setCellValue(attachmentData[0]);
                cell2.setCellValue(attachmentData[1]);

                System.out.println("New Cell Data: 1-"+cell.getStringCellValue()+" 2-"+cell2.getStringCellValue());

                FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(xslFile);
                theWorkbook.write(fos);
                fos.close();

Has anyone ran in to similar issue?

Answer 1

I got the same error message but had used different classes. Current poi version I'm using is poi-ooxml 3.9 but it still has the issue. Now I fixed my problem and I think this problem arises when you obtain Workbook instance at first.

When I write data to the file, I do like this (with practice rules for exceptions and close):

    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(filePath);
    wb.write(fos);
    fos.close();

I got "Can't obtain the input stream from /docProps/app.xml" error message, when I obtained Workbook instance like this:

    Workbook wb = WorkbookFactory.create(new File(filePath));

When I fixed the problem, modified code was

    Workbook wb = WorkbookFactory.create(new FileInputStream(filePath));

In my case it doesn't matter whether you open and read from and write to the same file, or read from one file then write to another. If you read the poi source codes, you could see the factory methods I used might call open() methods in OPCPackage class. Try using the method getting InputStream as its argument.