Is there any way apart of XSTL which dynamically generates HTML form based on metadata specified inside a XML? Take note that I'm developing a JAVA web application here. There won't be a lot of metadata inside the XML, which means that the XML is very simple. For worst case scenario, I would just build my own XML processor and generate HTML code with Java.
Consider JAXB to map your XML to Java objects. Once you have the data in Java, you can plug it into the templating engine of your choice.
One - less recommended - way is to display and style xml by use of css. See here for an example.
I would tend to go for XSLT if you need to go from one XML format to another one (HTML in this situation) in 99% of the cases. Not sure why you have that scratched as an option already ..
Cheers,
Wim
Its answered here : Generate HTML form dynamically using xml and reusable xslt.
And complete example is described here : http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.com/2011/09/xslt-using-reusable-xsl-to-generate.html
You have to extend xsl file (answered there) for complex html forms
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I am currently working at a project which generates contracts. The idea is that I put the data in a form and save it in a simple database.
So long, this was my favorite place to search for good ideas and simple solutions.
Now I am facing another problem and I don't know how I can solve that. I want to create a PDF and replace some placeholders with some data from my form.
One idea was, that I use an existing Word template with some bookmarks and replace them with the data from my form. Maybe there is a way to do that, and I am just too stupid to find it.
Another idea was, that I am using XML. Therefore, I thought I was clever and just converted the Word template to an PDF, so I am able to convert that PDF to an XML. Attached, you find the XML file. But now I need the XSL file - is there an easy way to create the XSL file?
Or maybe there is another simple solution to solve my problem.
In these attachments you find the PDF file, the Word template and the XML:
Thank you a lot :)
Using a template is a good idea - it makes some changes much quicker to make and then deploy. The comments above are focused on conversion, but don't forget you need to merge your data in (population) first.
If you can use Adobe tools, you can have a PDF template and use the Adobe tools to populate. This saves a "conversion" stage.
You mentioned using Word for templates. This means you to run through two stages of processing:
population - docx is a zipped set of XML files - so you can process them with your own code or using a library.
conversion - you need pdf, so you have to convert the docx to pdf. You also have to watch out for fonts at this stage (ie make sure they are available on your host).
The population stage you could do yourself since you are familiar with XML. But it is definitely complicated. The conversion needs to use a tool that is ideal for it. There are a few mentioned in the comments already.
There are some free/os and commercial tools that can do both parts:
docx4j
JOD Reports
Libre Office (using the Java Uno API) (I blogged this once - Java Convert Word to PDF with UNO)
Docmosis (please note I work for Docmosis)
I suggest starting with the simple example you have attached and prove you can both populate and convert that. Then switch to a more complicated example to see if you can do the other things that might be required (eg repeating or conditions or other logic) during the population stage.
I have hundreds of rich PDFs that need to be generated from my application, they have images and colorful content. I was looking to build a framework which support a template and data model and can take care of rest, so adding anew pdfs would be just adding a new template. In the past i have used free-marker to generate HTML and that print HTML to PDFs, are there any better recent solution to solve this problem?
There are various things you could do:
generate xml data, apply xslt transformation to style it, and convert
the html document to a pdf
code a small class that converts whatever data format you have to a pdf document (you would need to do all the layout through code)
create a template (using whatever design program you want) pdf document, insert form fields, and have iText fill the form (several of our customers go for this approach)
Keep in mind that JasperReports uses a proprietary format. Whereas the approaches I suggested use only open and well-established formats.
Take a look at JasperReports.
Is it a good idea? Well I have used other 3rd party Libraries like JSoup and it works great, but for this project it's different. Is it worth it to load and parse a whole document when you just want to get one item from it? Some of the html pages are simple too, so I could use String methods too. Reason is cause memory will be an issue, and it also takes some time to load the document too. When parsing XML I always use a SAX Parser because it doesn't load it in memory and it is fast. Could I use the same thing on html documents, or is there already one like this out there? So if there is a non-DOM HTML lightweight parser, that would be great too.
If the HTML is XML compliant (i.e. it's XHTML) then you can use a standard SAX parser. Here you can find a list of HTML parsers in Java to choose from: http://java-source.net/open-source/html-parsers. HotSax probably will handle all your use cases.
I have following problem: I have a XML file with XSL stylesheet, that is rendering this XML file as neat table in HTML when I load it in web browser. Now I need to make a PDF that is looking EXACTLY like that XSL-styled XML in web browser, without need for making custom FO's for every file. Everything must be done in Java.
I need to make a PDF that is looking EXACTLY like that XSL-styled XML in web browser
Think again about this requirement. Paged media such as PDF and non-paged media such as HTML may only look "close enough", but never "exactly like" each other. This is even more obvious if you consider your HTML being displayed on devices with different screen sizes.
If you relax the above requirement somewhat, you'll probably agree that XSL-FO is the best choice. You definitely do not need to write "custom FO's for every file": write an XSLT just once, and use it on-the-fly to convert your XML to XSL-FO, and then use a rendering engine to process XSL-FO to PDF. Simple.
XSL-FO does sound like exactly what you need. But if that's not an option, first explicitly doing the XSLT transform on the XML in Java and then converting the resulting HTML (which by then is a String/byte array/DOM/whatever you want) to PDF using some additional library would do the trick. There's some libraries that support HTML to PDF, like iText for example. XSLT transformations in Java are really simple. Little code involved there.
JPedal library in java is usually used to convert pdf to XML or HTML. However, I needed to know if we could extract data from HTML5 document and save it to XML using JPedal library API?
Is there any other possible alternative to this?
Also , I am trying to parse HTML5 document using Java and store it in XML. are there any good solutions to find just specific tags and render an XML out of them?
Please do let me know . Thank you.
There are a number of Java HTML parsers out there, but I recommend using the HTML5 parser from validator.nu available for download from here: http://about.validator.nu/htmlparser/.
Written to use the HTML5 parser algorithm by one of the main protagonists of HTML5, Henri Sivonen of Mozilla, you won't find a more reliable HTML parser and it creates a true DOM that can be manipulated using standard XML tools and queried for hyperlinks using XPath. There are examples of how to use XSLT transformations with it and how to get an XML serialization of the created DOM.