Sorry I meant CSV and Excel files...
PDF is possible it is one of two rendering targets Birt currently
supports.
As for the other questions
Well my experiences so far are
iText in a rollout, and birt for testing,
an ex colleque of mine once used fop as rendering
engine.
And I also have used POI.
And Velocity of course.
For jasper I do not have first hand experience, but some people like it.
iText is somewhat too low level for what you try to achieve.
I did that once for a person form, which had to be rendered on the fly
into something PDFish and ended up with around 2000 lines of code
(700 of it being a factory which generated all the elements
of the form on the fly, to have it encapsuled)
But iText is excellent if you have to pump out huge reports of thousands
of pages, it does scale excellently.
(I once used it to concatenate thousands of pdf pages into a huge
compound document, and it blew the adobe tools against the wall,
literally, speedwise)
But doing the form job in iText in my opinion was choosing the wrong
tool for the job, I probably would have done it with birt in much less time.
Jasper is pretty equal to Birt to my knowledge of Jasper, but the better
layouting tools are commercial (there is at least one jasper layouting
tool for eclipse, but that one costs 100$)
But one thing seems to be solved in Jasper huge reports, they have
integrated a special mechanism for that job (basically a rendering swap
space for holding the render tree)
Also jasper seems to have more rendering targets as birt.
As for POI nice library for doing Microsoft documents, but it has the
problem, it is also only suitable for large reports, because it keeps
the entire rendering tree in ram before pumping out the document.
Velocity is not really suitable for pumping out pdf reports but it is a
very nice templating library nevertheless. (perfect for text based
output in whatever textformat you can imagine)
In the end you probably if you want to stay on the shoestring side of
things budgetwise probably will end up with a combination of tools.
Handcoding or iText for large complicated reports, (maybe jasper as well
although it has page break problems on subreports)
and something graphical for the form like stuff, which is heavier on the
layouting side of things.
Cocoon also could be an option if you have raw xml core data you have to
render towards different targets.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have read that saving the PDF is not possible yet, but I don't understand
this.
I mean when BIRT creates the PDF the Acrobat Reader should open and there I can
save the PDF or do i err?
Regards
Andy
PS: Do you have experiences with other libraries already or don't you know them
yourself?
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Auftrag von Werner Punz
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 14. Dezember 2005 19:59
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: AW: Re: AW: Re: What PDF library or framework to create PDF
on the fly-->iText?
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
______________________________________________________________________
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom
they are
addressed. If you have received this email in error please
notify your
system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email
message has
been swept for the presence of computer viruses.
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________>
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please
notify> your system manager.
This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept
for the presence of computer viruses.
______________________________________________________________________>
______________________________________________________________________
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
your system manager.
This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept
for the presence of computer viruses.
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
your system manager.
This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept
for the presence of computer viruses.
______________________________________________________________________
