WebObjects/Web Applications/Development/PDF Generation

Overview You might want to also review the Returning a File example. Zak Burke's Example It is important to add "-Djava.awt.headless=true" to the "Additional Arguments" list to suppress a console window running WOBootstrap that will try to pop up and then fail to close, which seems to prevent the thread from returning, which causes the app to hang. private ByteArrayOutputStream pdf() { // binary container for PDF ByteArrayOutputStream out = null; try { // assume these exist String xsl, xml; TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance(); // configure FOP, apache's XML->PDF transformer Fop fop = new Fop(MimeConstants.MIME_PDF); out = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); fop.setOutputStream(out); // configure XSLT transformer Source xsltSrc = new StreamSource(new StringReader(xsl)); Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer(xsltSrc); // pipe XSL transformation through to FOP Result res = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler()); // grab XML input stream Source src = new StreamSource(new StringReader(xml)); // Start the transformation and rendering process transformer.transform(src, res); } catch (Exception e) { // actually, catch the following, one by one: // TransformerConfigurationException // FOPException // TransformerFactoryConfigurationError // TransformerException } return out; } public void appendToResponse(WOResponse response, WOContext context) { ByteArrayOutputStream out = pdf(); // without data, show the PDF page, which is just an error message. if (out == null) super.appendToResponse(response, context); // assume this exists String filename; response.setHeader("application/pdf", "Content-Type"); response.setHeader("" + out.size() + "", "Content-Length"); response.setHeader("attachment;filename=" + filename, "Content-Disposition"); response.setContent(new NSData(out.toByteArray())); } Related Links FyTek Exe/DLL PDF Libraries Big Faceless Organization - Java PDF Library & Report Generator Java PDF Libraries Apache FOP Deirdre Saoirse Moen's FOP Example JClass Etymon PJ PDFLib PD4ML iText Hugi Karlmenn's iText Example WebPDF Reports XSL:FO Examples ReportMill