Book Image

Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Book Image

Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Overview of this book

XML is an open standard for creating markup languages and exchanging structured documents and data over the Internet. JDeveloper 11g presents an effective, quick, and easy-to-use means of processing XML documents. Inspired by the author's previous XML articles for the Oracle community, this expanded hands-on tutorial guides newcomers and intermediate users through JDeveloper 11g and XML document development. It offers up-to-date information on working with the latest version of JDeveloper, and brand new information on JAXB 2.0 support in JDeveloper 11g. Filled with illustrations, explanatory tables, and comprehensive instructions, this book walks the reader through the wide assortment of JDeveloper's capabilities. Oracle's JDeveloper 11g is an Integrated Development Environment that provides a visual and declarative approach to application development. Over the course of 14 chapters, readers will get hands-on with JDeveloper as the comprehensive and self-contained tutorials provide clear instruction on the key XML tasks that JDeveloper can accomplish. Filled with practical information and illustrated examples, this book shows the reader how to create, parse, and store XML documents quickly, as well as providing step-by-step instructions on how to construct an XML schema and use the schema to validate an XML document. Oracle's XML Developer Kit (XDK) offers a set of components, tools, and utilities for developing XML-based applications, and developers will find the detailed XDK coverage invaluable. Later chapters are given over to using XPath, transforming XML with XSLT, and using the JSTL XML Tag Library. Moving through the book, a chapter on the JAXB 2.0 API shows you how to bind, marshal and unmarshal XML documents, before we finally delve into comparing XML documents, and converting them into PDF and Excel formats. In all, this book will enable the reader to gain a good and wide-ranging understanding of what JDeveloper has to offer for XML processing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 11. Converting XML to PDF

XML is the most suitable format for data exchange, but not for data presentation. Adobe's PDF and Microsoft Excel's spreadsheet are the commonly used formats for data presentation. If you receive an XML file containing data that needs to be included in a PDF or Excel spreadsheet file, you need to convert the XML file to the relevant format. Some of the commonly used XML-to-PDF conversion tools/APIs are discussed in the following table:

Tool/API

Description

iText

iText is a Java library for generating a PDF document. iText may be downloaded from http://www.lowagie.com/iText/.

Stylus Studio XML Publisher

XML Publisher is a report designer, which supports many data sources, including XML, to generate PDF reports.

Stylus Studio XML Editor

XML Editor supports XML conversion to PDF.

Apache FOP

The Apache project provides an open source FO processor called Apache FOP to render an XSL-FO document as a PDF document. We will discuss the Apache FOP processor...