ZK Spreadsheet Essentials 3.x/Working with Spreadsheet/Setting Up Environment

The purpose of this section is to tell you how to prepare an environment for working with Spreadsheet in API.

Prerequisites

Before developing a web application with Spreadsheet, you should prepare the following softwares:

• Install JDK 1.5 or above
• Install an application server
  • You can install any JavaEE application server you like. If you don't have one, Tomcat is a good choice.
• Install Eclipse or other development tool.
  • In this book, we will use Eclipse as the default IDE to explain related setup.

Prepare a Dynamic Web Project

To save your time from creating a project out of nothing, you could just download the sample project which is a ready-to-run Eclipse dynamic web project. Even if you insist to create a project by your own, you still can reference the sample project.

There are several files inside the sample project that require to explain:

• /WEB-INF/web.xml

This web descriptor contains minimum configuration to run Spreadsheet.

• /WEB-INF/lib

All jar files required to run Spreadsheet are here. You should see zss.jar in it.

• /index.zul

The page that uses Spreadsheet, and you can learn the basic usage and configuration.

	<window title="My First ZK Spreadsheet Application" apply="org.zkoss.zss.essential.MyComposer"
		border="normal" vflex="1" width="100%">
		<spreadsheet src="/WEB-INF/book/startzss.xlsx" vflex="1" width="100%"
		maxVisibleRows="150" maxVisibleColumns="40"
		 showToolbar="true" showSheetbar="true" showFormulabar="true"/>
	</window>

• Line 1: We assign a controller in apply attribute to control Window and its child component.

• org.zkoss.zss.example.startzss.MyComposer.java

This class is a controller where we can write codes to control Spreadsheet e.g. listening Spreadsheet's events, or get an object of Spreadsheet. For complete explanation, please refer to ZK Developer's Reference/MVC/Controller/Composer

Prepare a Maven Project

If you want to create a Maven project, you can [http:// download our sample Maven project] to avoid creating from scratch.

If you use Compact Edition (CE) The main dependency in the sample project is org.zkoss.zss:zss:

		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.zkoss.zss</groupId>
			<artifactId>zss</artifactId>
			<version>${zss.version}</version>
		</dependency>

• ${zss.version} can be 3.0.0 or above.

If you want to use Enterprise Edition (EE), you should replace org.zkoss.zss:zss with org.zkoss.zss:zssex and add org.zkoss.zk:zkmax.

		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.zkoss.zss</groupId>
			<artifactId>zssex</artifactId>
			<version>${zss.version}</version>
		</dependency>	
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.zkoss.zk</groupId>
			<artifactId>zkmax</artifactId>
			<version>${zk.version}</version>
		</dependency>

• If ${zss.version} is 3.0.0 or above, ${zk.version} should be 6.5.2.

Except there is no JAR under /WEB-INF/lib, the rest are the same as dynamic web project. Please read previous paragraph about explanation of web.xml, index.zul and MyComposer.java.