reports- Urgent, please help

[Leandro Oliveira]

I've gotten to create a report, but this report must be perfectly well on the paper, the client will see it in his browser and then click somewhere to print. What do you sugest?? should I send the report in pdf format??? My only problem is: how can I control the pages size??? can I control the page size if I use pdf format??? Please help me!!!

[Joe Broderick]

what program are you using to generate the repost. is this report being displayed on a jsp page? what i do under these circumstances is try and filter everything out but the text, and then do minimual formatting so it prints out in blocks. if you give me a bit more information, i will try and offer better suggestions.

[Leandro Oliveira]

it looks like I've gotten to code a program that generates the report, In my case, I'm not supposed to use crystal reports (for example) I've gotten to create my own 'crystal reports'. That generates good reports. To do this I was thinking about creating a pdf file and sending to somebody (the invoker of the report server) the file in pdf format. What do you think??? is it too difficult to code???

[Chris Baron]

Hi leandro,
you can use FOP to generate the PDF.
http://xml.apache.org/fop/embedding.html
I used a trick recently:
Instead of parsing the *.fo-File from *.xml and *.xsl, i wrote a *.jsp ...with db-connection and loops etc... that outputted xsl-fo instead of html.
xsl-fo syntax:
http://xml.apache.org/fop/fo.html
( took about one day to paint a page in required coporate design, quite html-like )
On the jsp i got an inputstream via java.net.URLConnection and sticked it into FOP
( first link i posted )
Another pdf-tool is iText:
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/

hth cb
[ May 09, 2003: Message edited by: Christian Baron ]