I am new to birt myself, so take it with a grain of salt what I am saying here,
(better ask in the birt eclipse forum)
To my understanding there are various ways, one is programmatic,
so you just define some kind of servlet which renders it on the fly
and delivers it. (alternatively you can write yourself a jsf control ;-) )

The other one is, that the bird runtime comes with a complete web application which allows you to link to (which might be some kind of security problem)


Also have in mind, that birt still has some limitations, yesterday, I gave it a testrun on a collection of huge data, and it started to choke
on around thousand pages, csv is also no rendering target yet, but
for your purpose of having a form like pdf report, birt should do the job. Also you currently have to generate the report on the fly
later incarnations will have a save option integrated.

as for deployment info: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/deploy/


I would say, give it a testrun, if it can fit your needs...

If not there are various other options (jasper, fop, velocity,
itext etc...)





[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi!
Thx for your answers...

I just have began with Eclispe Birt and it looks quite cool, but I have one 
question.
Can I ran such reports directly from my jsp pages via a Button?
If yes, how can I do that, because I didn't see anything on the BIRT Homepage.
(I only saw, that you can ran it StandAlone and so on, but I want it that way:
Press the button (pass some parameters through the button) and display the 
report!
Is this possible with BIRT?

Regards
Andy

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Auftrag von Werner Punz
Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. Dezember 2005 21:55
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: AW: Re: What PDF library or framework to create PDF on the
fly-->iText?


Well to get it right, the original poster asked for a way to render
the jsf files into pdf automatically, this is neither possible with xsl-fo nor any other templating mechanism mentioned (cocoon and a bunch of others)

What probably could be achieved would be some cocoon like intermediate rendering step which renders the page

a) into a jsf page given a certain base data
b) into a pdf page


but this is out of scope for simply applying fop (xsl-fo) you will end up with something cocoonish that way and it is probably out of the time
scope of the original poster to implement such a thing.

If you do not want to spend time on a research project into code generation I really can recommend, to split the view into following concerns

a) a simple HTML Rendering of your forms, which already is done in JSF
b) a reporting part which extracts nice pdfs closely looking like your forms, this can be done with any reporting tool you like, xsl-fo, birt, japser reports or whatever technology to use as reporting frontend.




Alan Biggs wrote:

FOP is a standard but almost
not used, so design tools are scarce,


Some commercial products use FOP for rendering, such as Altova Stylevision and 
Stylus Studio (both of which you can get free trials of).
I believe FOP is used quote a lot when it fits the scenario. The FOP site 
itself does what the original poster asked - renders a PDF version of each of 
its HTML pages.



you should probably give visual
tools in conjunction with reporting engines a shot


Altova Stylevision is a visual tool/reporting engine based on XML with FOP 
integration.

Not sure about Stylus, but Stylevision I believe allows you to import an HTML 
file and then generate the PDF from the result. It will also generate the XSLT 
for you to plug into your favourite XML library.

FOP is undergoing a long and complete rewrite to support complex features which 
were hard to do in the previous version, but the current release is fairly 
stable and functional for the more basic layout tasks. If you are using complex 
layouts, you will probably get frustrated. (whatever technology you use!)

Alan B.

----- Original Message -----
From: Werner Punz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 6:56 am
Subject: Re: AW:  Re: What PDF library or framework to create PDF on the 
fly-->iText?



Fop is just another approach of going from a meta description to a
result with different rendering targets. FOP is a standard but almost
not used, so design tools are scarce, you should probably give visual
tools in conjunction with reporting engines a shot:
Following ones come to my mind
Jasper Reports with one of the Design tools (which there are a handful)Eclipse Birt which is free and looks also very good.




[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


So you think FOP is not the best approach and idea?


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: news [EMAIL PROTECTED] Auftrag von Werner Punz
Gesendet: Dienstag, 13. Dezember 2005 14:21
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: What PDF library or framework to create PDF on the
fly-->iText?


There is no direct way to do that, you only can simulate the

form layout


some mentioned cocoon, but that one is only usable that way if

you use


cocoon as html frontend as well, but that seems to be out of the
question, I can recommend to think about simulating your form in PDF
with the given data,
BIRT seems to be quite good for this area since it allows various
datasources and a viusal design.
Handcoding that stuff via iText is not recommendable, been there

done> that too much code.




[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:



I already asked some days ago, now I had time to look a bit at

iText and


after that I'm not really smarter than before.

I'm not sure if this library will help me.
I want to do the following:
The Myfaces JSF Page is normally shown to the user (some results

from a

report or some text from the database)
Now I want to have a button, which generates a PDF File out of

this screen.


So the PDF Creating must be done on the fly (depending on what

the user


sees)

How can I do that?
Any examples?

Thx, Regards
Andy

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