Developer Forum

Hi,

I support an enterprise web application (IE client) built in VB6, with about
200 classes, serving about 7000 users, running on 3 clustered servers. I
need to incorporate web reporting for the first time, so I am interested in
learning what web reporting options are out there, and the pros and cons of
each. In general I need to generate reports with XML documents as inputs,
and make them available to all web users.

I am partial to generating PDF docs, but am open to all suggestions.
Ideally they will be generated on the
fly (synchronously), although I could do it asynchronously, and notify users
when the reports are ready to be viewed. I need to reporting engine to be
server safe (i.e. not interested in automating Microsoft Office, and
exporting Access, Word, or Excel to files).

Thanks for any suggestions!

PJ

Crystal Reports 10 allows the use of XML as the database for reports and
offers pdf as one of the export options. One caveat, their support is VERY
poor!

Wayne



about
in
of
users

if you're using a SQL 2000 database you might wanna look into SQL Server
Reporting Services.

http://www.yqcomputer.com/

Follow-up question: It was suggested to me that I look into XSL-FO to
satisfy my project's requirements (dynamically generate PDF files on a web
server using XML documents as the data source). Can anyone weigh in on the
topic of XSL Formatting Objects, and help me learn what tools are available
and currently being used to generate PDF files from XML?

Thank you in advance!

PJ





about
in
of
users

XSL spec in W3C.

http://www.yqcomputer.com/

I don't think there is a tool to format arbitrary xmls. You may want to
write your own xslt. There are examples in the spec. There are formatting
tools like FOP which you can download freely.

http://www.yqcomputer.com/



the
available


I
inputs,
be

Sorry, I should have specified, I am looking for tools that run on a Windows
platform to generate PDF files on a web
server using XML documents as the data source. Can anyone help me learn
what tools are
available and currently being used to generate PDF files from XML on a
Windows desktop or server?

Many thanks.

PJ






web


interested
cons
to

J

I am using FOP http://xml.apache.org/fop/ to generate PDF's. The apache site
has some good information on the various moving parts. I have a win2k server
running tomcat and have created a java servlet that reads xml data and
transforms it using an xsl file (which is nothing but adding XLS:FO
formatting info).
The 2 main steps here are first converting your XML data into XSL:FO format
and then using the FOP API to create PDF.

here some sample java code using FOP API (this is the 2nd step after getting
your data in XSL:FO format)

public void renderFO(InputSource foFile,
HttpServletResponse response) throws
ServletException {
long coll_event_c_entity_id = 0;
try {

// Generate PDF from FO

ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
Driver driver = new Driver(foFile, out);
driver.setRenderer(Driver.RENDER_PDF);
driver.run();

byte[] content = out.toByteArray();

// Send output to Browser

response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.setContentLength(content.length);
response.getOutputStream().write(content);
response.getOutputStream().flush();
} catch (Exception ex) {

throw new ServletException(ex.getMessage(),ex);

}
}





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Windows
formatting
on
with
servers.
notify