pdf reports

[manasa teja]

I need your help on creatring PDF reports in my project. I have a JSP, which has sevaral links such as " Customers visited today" and Customers visited in the month" etc. Upon clicking the links, the JSp should fetch the data from the database and put them in printable PDF document, so that the user can view the report as well as print the report.
Basically , the report need to be genearated in PDF format.
Could u please help me with different ways to achieve this...

[Balan Raj]

Check out Apache's FOP.. You can define XSL templates and pass XML input to get out PDF's.
http://xml.apache.org/fop/

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

iText also does this.

[Bear Bibeault]

Welcome to the Ranch, lal lal!
You'll find this forum a great place to seek help on JSP pages, and there aren't many rules you'll have to worry about, but one is that proper names are required. Please take a look at the JavaRanch Naming Policy and change your display name to match it.
Thanks!
bear
JSP Bartender

[Scott Duncan]

There is a package called JClass (and many others) out there that can handle this rather nicely but it costs a bit. If that is a problem use xalan to transform a DOM and xsl into a PDF file.

[manasa teja]

Thanks for yoru replies. We have been asked to verify , which one of Itext adn FOP are simple and easy to implement. basically, our reports are simple replorts.. As per my understanding , FOP is a bit heavy-weight generally used for complex reports.. whereas Itext is is for simple reports..
But, I request yu to give me suggestions on which one to choose to generate the PDf reports..
t

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

As per my understanding , FOP is a bit heavy-weight generally used for complex reports.. whereas Itext is is for simple reports..

I agree with that statement. iText provides many examples (and a tutorial) so it is easy to cut and paste code to get the features you want.

[Balan Raj]

I'm not familiar with iText so I can't comment on it.
Since I've used FOP, I can say its pretty easy to use, though you need to have some 3 jars.
FOP does comes with its own set of examples which can be used out of the box or with modification as it suits you and there is a Yahoo group called XSL-FO which can help
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XSL-FO/
Am I hard selling FOP ?

[Rodolfo Baeza]

You can also try http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.object-refinery.com/jfreereport/ both allows you to generate PDF reports from any swing or web application, and both are open source.