Using FOP in Custom Action Block

[Former Member]

Dear All

I am planning to use FOP to overcome some of the problems with PDFActions (eg. fixed column widths in tables).

I know from other posts that a few of you have done this, and was hoping that someone could give me some tips to getting started. I am not particularly Java-literate and the FOP site is a bit overwhelming, never mind the difficulties I've had with custom action blocks!

Has anyone used FOP with JSP rather than Custom Action Block? Is this an option?

Thanks for any help.

Nick

[Former Member]

Hello,

I've tried to create a custom action in order to create PDF with Apache FOP, I've experienced a lot of problems:

- jar size about 15 MB ( every time something's changed I would need to upload a new version and with and through a VPN connection is very slow )

- classpath problems, several fop dependant jars are already in the xMii classpath with an older version it generates a lot of conflicts.

Having this troubles I decided to create a workaround, this is my solution:

I've created a stand alone web application that is called by irpt page passing all need parameters, my web app then re-call a xmii url to get xml from a xacute query. After grabbing XML from URL web apps makes the transformation between fo file and xml and return a PDF file.

Roberto

[Former Member]

2 Custom Actions:

FO2PDF: Direct transformation from a .fo to a.pdf-Document.

XML2PDF: Transformation from a XML with XSLT to a .pdf-Document

Transformation-Code can directly copied from here:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/embedding.html#examples

Batik-1.6 for embedding svg and images into the pdf.

Barcode4J can be used to include Barcodes.

All .jar about 9MByte and no dependency-failure till yet.

Stefan