Tutorials : Using FOP with Java

XSL FO Example

Now it is time to see how XSL-FO looks in practice. Let us consider a sample XML file containing a book catalogue data in Listing-1.

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Catalogue>
<Book>
  <Title>Mastering EJB</Title>
  <Author>Ed Roman</Author>
  <Price>$45.00</Price>
</Book>
<Book>
  <Title>Design Patterns</Title>
  <Author>Erich Gamma</Author>
  <Price>$50.00</Price>
</Book>
<Book>
  <Title>Effective Java</Title>
  <Author>Josch Bloch</Author>
  <Price>$30.00</Price>
</Book>
 
</Catalogue>

Assume that we want to display all the Book mentioned in this Catalogue in a tabular format as shown below.

Mastering EJB	Ed Roman	$45.00
Design Patterns	Erich Gamma	$50.00
Effective Java	Josch Bloch	$30.00

Listing -2 "pdfGen.xsl" is the XSL stylesheet file to get the XML data formatted to such a tabular form.

See Example

As you can see, that <fo:root> element contains all the page, region and block layout information. The second part of the XSL-FO applies the XSL template to obtain the data from the matching element names from the XML file.

Note: One important thing to notice is that when we pass a XML file through this XSL, FOP can produce a resultant FO document. That FO Document will retain all the formatting and layout information and will replace the XSL templates with the actual value from the XML data. However, depending upon the render type specified within FOP, the FO document may or may not be visible to the programmer.

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