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CFSPREADSHEET action=”write” java.lang.NullPointerException error

June 7, 2016

Came across some odd CFSPREADSHEET behavior in ColdFusion.

I was attempting to quickly export a query object to an Excel spreadsheet:

<cfset tmpXLSFile = "#getTempDirectory()#data_export.csv">
<cfspreadsheet action="write" overwrite="true" filename="#tmpXLSFile#" query="exportData">

ColdFusion kept throwing this strange error:

An exception occurred while using action="write" java.lang.NullPointerException

Everything seemed ok with my code and my query.

After some head scratching I noticed that my file variable had a .CSV extension. Changing this to XLS fixed the issue immediately:

<cfset tmpXLSFile = "#getTempDirectory()#data_export.xls">
<cfspreadsheet action="write" overwrite="true" filename="#tmpXLSFile#" query="exportData">

Not sure why ColdFusion cares about the file extension.