Force Displaytag Export to Text

When I was using displaytag to export to excel, one of my columns contained text which was being recognized as numeric (scientific notation). When googling for a possible solution, seems like a LOT of people have had this problem in various ways (displaytag or otherwise). Thanks to this webpage, my solution was to write the following column decorator:

Custom Decorator

<jsp:scriptlet>
        request.setAttribute("yourdecorator", new DisplaytagColumnDecorator() {            
                public Object decorate(Object o, PageContext pageContext, MediaTypeEnum media) {
                    String decorated = (String)o;
                    if (media.equals(MediaTypeEnum.EXCEL) || media.equals(MediaTypeEnum.CSV)) {
                        decorated= "=\"" + packet + "\"";
                    }

                    return decorated
                }            
            }
        );
</jsp:scriptlet>

<display:column title="your-title" media="xml excel csv" property="your-property" decorator="yourdecorator" />

I have not run into any issues with this approach yet. If you do, I would appreciate a comment back. Thanks again to the guy who posted the hint that I reference previously.

p.s. Someone also suggested that I prepend the text with a unicode non-breaking space (see code following). Visually, it has the desired effect but it also modifies the text in the field so I do not like the solution as well. I just offer that solution to those who might want to use it.

Custom Decorator

    ...
    decorated= "\u00a0" + packet;