19.10.1 Introduction

Returning an HTML page isn’t always the best way for the user to view the model output, and Spring makes it simple to generate a PDF document or an Excel spreadsheet dynamically from the model data. The document is the view and will be streamed from the server with the correct content type to (hopefully) enable the client PC to run their spreadsheet or PDF viewer application in response.

In order to use Excel views, you need to add the 'poi' library to your classpath, and for PDF generation, the iText library.