Modifying a PowerPoint table using POI-3.10-FINAL

Question

I've been having issues using POI-3.10-FINAL where editing a PPTX doesn't fully work. I noticed that I am successfully able to add new slides, but modifications to shapes (in this case, a table) aren't reflected in the outputted PPTX file.

I was able to fix it by switching from poi-ooxml-schemas-*.jar to ooxml-schemas-1.1.jar but the resulting PPTX file seems to be corrupted: PowerPoint 2007 fails to open it but PowerPoint 2010 repairs it first, then properly opens it.

In investigating the issue, I noticed that the "docProps/app.xml" is not being updated correctly (I'm assuming other files within the PPTX aren't being updated as well).

Any ideas?

What updates were you expecting to see within docProps/app.xml? — Gagravarr
I was expecting to see updated information about the current number of slides, number of notes.... I've been able to fix my issue though, and it had nothing to do with the app.xml document. See my answer below — Kouame

Kouame Kouame · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-30T14:02:41

I've been able to properly troubleshoot and fix my POI issues using Microsoft's OpenXml SDK (see OpenXml SDK). The SDK helps you scan through a PPTX file (or any other OpenXml document) and compiles a list of all errors it finds.

In my case, I was setting one of my table cell's text value to null. In turn, POI generated the xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" declaration at the top most slide tag and used xsi:nil="true" within the cell's tag which PowerPoint absolutely did not like.

Another issue I was having was that I was modifying and creating new rows and columns within my table. To make things easier in my code, whenever I did anything to a cell, I made sure I set the border information to black with a width of 1 and the fill color to white. For some odd reason it seems that POI was not replacing the border information, but appending it which made the PPTX have 2 conflicting values rather than 1 (I have to investigate this one further but checking the border and fill information before trying to set them definitely fixed my issue).

These issues were rather easy to fix once I figured them out.

Modifying a PowerPoint table using POI-3.10-FINAL

1 Answers