Setting filename for JIRA Excel report

Written on October 19, 2019

Normally, when you click the Excel View in your report, you get a file named ConfigureReport!excelView.jspa. But what if you want a more user-friendly name that is recognized as an Excel file?

All you need to do is to set a proper response header, in this case content-disposition. Just use the following code in your report’s generateReportExcel() method:

import java.net.URLEncoder;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import webwork.action.ActionContext;

// ...

public class TestReport extends AbstractReport {
  // get report name from it's definition, encode it as UTF-8 
  String encodedFilename = URLEncoder.encode(getDescriptor().getName(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name());
  // replace + character with an URL encoded space character and add an xls extension
  encodedFilename = encodedFilename.replaceAll("\\+", "%20") + ".xls";
  // create content-disposition header value
  String contentDisposition = "attachment;filename*=UTF-8''" + encodedFilename;
  // add the content-disposition HTTP header
  ActionContext.getResponse().addHeader("content-disposition", contentDisposition);
  
  // ...
}

We use it in an abstract parent of our reports and just call super.generateReportExcel(...) from child classes.

Btw. the content-disposition format used above might not work in all browsers. If you need to support older browsers, use the filename value twice, once with and once without the asterisk:

  String contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=" + encodedFilename + "; filename*=UTF-8''" + encodedFilename;

The above way of setting the value has been posted in the article Download non-english filenames by Rob Mueller.

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