Problem: I have to generate a PDF document/report from the database tables. The content has a tree-like structure. There's a master resultset, e.g. Organizations, with several fields. This may contain nested sub-resultsets for every Organization, e.g. Departments, Affiliates, etc. These sub-resultsets also may have nested resultsets, and so on. The tree is not very deep (3-4 layers).
So, the resulting PDF has sections for every Organization, inside it has subsections for Departments, Affiliates and so on. Like chapters and sections of a book. When section doesn't fit the page, on the next page's header there must be a section name repeated. So, if Affiliate breaks on the page end, then on the next page header there'll be: "Organization name", "Affiliate name", i.e. its each parent sections' names too. I found one way to do it with XSL-FO: there's a main fo-table(TM) with one column. Every row's the only cell contains a fo-table(T1), with header "Oraganization name". This T1 table's rows contain three blocks, one block is for Organization's fields, the other two blocks are for Departments and Affiliates, which are also fo-tables. This way whenever the section is broken into pages, the fo-tables' headers will appear on the next page for every broken section. E.g. when T1 breakes on page end, TM's and T1's headers will by rendered on the next page. This works fine rendering what I want. The issue is with performance. XSL-FO generation takes 3 seconds. PDF generation takes more than 15 seconds. So, FOP part is a bottleneck. I strongly suspect that these many embedded tables and blocks are causing troubles to FOP. I may be wrong though. I see two options: one is to change FOP to something else (renderex?), the other one is to change the structure of XSL-FO document. I'm going to work on the problem these days, since it appears that performance is going to be the main concern for customers. So, I'll appreciate any advises very much. thanks, Argyn
