laneys.info Beware of Yankees, drunks, and loose women.

This process arose from an internal need for dynamic reporting. Crystal Reports was not an option.

• Native PDF code
• Acrobat API (commercial)
• FDF files
• FOP

FOP is by the Apache Project. It is a series of Java classes that use XSL formatting objects to create PDF files. FO Document → FOP Java Server → PDF

1. Verify JDK is installed.
2. Install Java XML Parsing Engine (Xalan and Xerces).
3. Install FOP.

A subset of XSL: XSLT is the first half, FO is the second. FO is similar to CSS.

Page Template(s) – like a slide master

• region-before
• region-after
• region-body
• region-start
• region-end

• Title – usually you can ignore this.
• Static-content – content for every page, like headers and footers.
• Flow – regular content

The elements must be in the order listed.

Block tag – like a <div> tag. There is no break tag, so blocks are the only way to get a CF/LF equivalent.

Inline tag – changes styles without a new block (CF/LF).

You can insert GIF and JPEG images, as well as vector graphics.

Tables – very like HTML tables, except it actually uses the dimensions you give it.

• fo:table
• fo:table-column
• fo:table-row
• fo:table-cell

Out-of-line block – not supported by FOP. Used to add footnotes or floating elements.

• keep-with-next
• keep-with-previous
• keep-together
• break

• start-indent
• end-indent
• text-indent

• color
• font-family
• font-size

• line-spacing
• line-height
• text-align

The FO document combines these to describe the entire document. 

CFML Template → CF Server → FO Document → FOP Java Processor → PDF Doc

1. Verify JDK is installed.
2. Install XML Parser
3. Install FOP
4. Copy cfxml.class into FOP directory.
5. Copy pdf.cfm custom tag into Custom Tags directory.
6. Use CFML to define the FO document dynamically.

Call your FO generator page from another CFM page that sets the cfcontent to the “application/pdf” MIME type, does a CFHTTP call to the FO generator page, and then calls the Create PDF custom tag.