POI-HSSF and POI-XSSF/SXSSF

HSSF is the POI Project's pure Java implementation of the Excel '97(-2007) file format. XSSF is the POI Project's pure Java implementation of the Excel 2007 OOXML (.xlsx) file format.

HSSF and XSSF provides ways to read spreadsheets create, modify, read and write XLS spreadsheets. They provide:

• low level structures for those with special needs

• an eventmodel api for efficient read-only access

• a full usermodel api for creating, reading and modifying XLS files

XSSF is an API-compatible streaming extension of XSSF to be used when very large spreadsheets have to be produced, and heap space is limited. SXSSF achieves its low memory footprint by limiting access to the rows that are within a sliding window, while XSSF gives access to all rows in the document. Older rows that are no longer in the window become inaccessible, as they are written to the disk.

In auto-flush mode the size of the access window can be specified, to hold a certain number of rows in memory. When that value is reached, the creation of an additional row causes the row with the lowest index to to be removed from the access window and written to disk. Or, the window size can be set to grow dynamically; it can be trimmed periodically by an explicit call to flushRows(int keepRows) as needed.

Due to the streaming nature of the implementation, there are the following limitations when compared to XSSF:

• Only a limited number of rows are accessible at a point in time.

• Sheet.clone() is not supported.

• Formula evaluation is not supported

SXSSF (package: org.apache.poi.xssf.streaming) is an API-compatible streaming extension of XSSF to be used when very large spreadsheets have to be produced, and heap space is limited. SXSSF achieves its low memory footprint by limiting access to the rows that are within a sliding window, while XSSF gives access to all rows in the document. Older rows that are no longer in the window become inaccessible, as they are written to the disk.

You can specify the window size at workbook construction time via new SXSSFWorkbook(int windowSize) or you can set it per-sheet via SXSSFSheet#setRandomAccessWindowSize(int windowSize)

When a new row is created via createRow() and the total number of unflushed records would exceed the specified window size, then the row with the lowest index value is flushed and cannot be accessed via getRow() anymore.

The default window size is 100 and defined by SXSSFWorkbook.DEFAULT_WINDOW_SIZE.

A windowSize of -1 indicates unlimited access. In this case all records that have not been flushed by a call to flushRows() are available for random access.

Note that SXSSF allocates temporary files that you must always clean up explicitly, by calling the dispose method.

SXSSFWorkbook defaults to using inline strings instead of a shared strings table. This is very efficient, since no document content needs to be kept in memory, but is also known to produce documents that are incompatible with some clients. With shared strings enabled all unique strings in the document has to be kept in memory. Depending on your document content this could use a lot more resources than with shared strings disabled.

Please note that there are still things that still may consume a large amount of memory based on which features you are using, e.g. merged regions, hyperlinks, comments, ... are still only stored in memory and thus may require a lot of memory if used extensively.如果你使用了合并区域、超链接、注释... ，这些信息还是存储在内存中，并没有flush到硬盘

Carefully review your memory budget and compatibility needs before deciding whether to enable shared strings or not.

The example below writes a sheet with a window of 100 rows. When the row count reaches 101, the row with rownum=0 is flushed to disk and removed from memory, when rownum reaches 102 then the row with rownum=1 is flushed, etc.

import junit.framework.Assert;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Cell;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Row;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Sheet;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Workbook;
import org.apache.poi.ss.util.CellReference;
import org.apache.poi.xssf.streaming.SXSSFWorkbook;

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Throwable {
        SXSSFWorkbook wb = new SXSSFWorkbook(100); // keep 100 rows in memory, exceeding rows will be flushed to disk
        Sheet sh = wb.createSheet();
        for(int rownum = 0; rownum < 1000; rownum++){
            Row row = sh.createRow(rownum);
            for(int cellnum = 0; cellnum < 10; cellnum++){
                Cell cell = row.createCell(cellnum);
                String address = new CellReference(cell).formatAsString();
                cell.setCellValue(address);
            }

        }

        // Rows with rownum < 900 are flushed and not accessible
        for(int rownum = 0; rownum < 900; rownum++){
          Assert.assertNull(sh.getRow(rownum));
        }

        // ther last 100 rows are still in memory
        for(int rownum = 900; rownum < 1000; rownum++){
            Assert.assertNotNull(sh.getRow(rownum));
        }
        
        FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("/temp/sxssf.xlsx");
        wb.write(out);
        out.close();

        // dispose of temporary files backing this workbook on disk
        wb.dispose();
    }