Instantiate org.apache.fop.apps.Driver. Once this class is instantiated, methods are called to set the Renderer to use and the OutputStream to use to output the results of the rendering (where applicable). In the case of the Renderer and ElementMapping(s), the Driver may be supplied either with the object itself, or the name of the class, in which case Driver will instantiate the class itself. The advantage of the latter is it enables runtime determination of Renderer and ElementMapping(s).
The simplest way to use Driver is to instantiate it with the InputSource and OutputStream, then set the renderer desired and call the run method.
Here is an example use of Driver which outputs PDF:
In the example above, args[0] contains the path to an XSL-FO file, while args[1] contains a path for the target PDF file.
You also need to set up logging. Global logging for all FOP
processes is managed by MessageHandler. Per-instance logging
is handled by Driver. You want to set both using an implementation
of org.apache.avalon.framework.logger.Logger. See
To setup the user config file you can do the following
Once the Driver is set up, the render method
is called. Depending on whether DOM or SAX is being used, the
invocation of the method is either render(Document) or
render(Parser, InputSource) respectively.
Another possibility may be used to build the FO Tree. You can
call getContentHandler() and fire the SAX events yourself.
Once the FO Tree is built, the format() and render() methods may be called in that order.
Here is an example use of Driver:
You can also specify an xml and xsl file for the input.
Here is an example use of Driver with the XSLTInputHandler:
Have a look at the classes CommandLineStarter or FopServlet for complete examples. Also, have a look at the examples at the bottom of this page.
java.awt that
intialises the java AWT classes. This means that a daemon thread
is created by the JVM and on Unix it will need to connect to a
DISPLAY.
The thread means that the Java application will not automatically quit
when finished, you will need to call System.exit(). These
issues should be fixed in the upcoming JDK 1.4FOP uses Jakarta Avalon's
Per default FOP uses the ConsoleLogger which logs to System.out. If you want to do logging using a logging framework (such as LogKit, Log4J or JDK 1.4 Logging) you can set a different Logger implementation on the Driver object. Here's an example how you would use LogKit:
The LogKitLogger class implements the Logger interface so all logging calls are being redirected to LogKit.
More information on Jakarta LogKit can be found
Similar implementations exist for Log4J (org.apache.avalon.framework.logger.Log4JLogger) and JDK 1.4 logging (org.apache.avalon.framework.logger.Jdk14Logger).
If you want FOP to be totally silent you can also set an org.apache.avalon.framework.logger.NullLogger instance.
If you want to use yet another logging facility you simply have to create a class that implements org.apache.avalon.framework.logging.Logger and set it on the Driver object. See the existing implementations in Avalon Framework for examples.
You may want to supply you input to FOP from different data sources.
For example you may have a DOM and XSL stylesheet or you may want to
set variables in the stylesheet. The page here:
You can use the content handler from the driver to create a SAXResult. The transformer then can fire SAX events on the content handler which will in turn create the rendered output.
Examples showing this can be found at the bott
If FOP is going to be used multiple times within your application it may be useful to reuse certain objects to save time.
The renderers and the driver can both be reused. A renderer is reusable once the previous render has been completed. The driver is reuseable after the rendering is complete and the reset method is called. You will need to setup the driver again with a new OutputStream, IntputStream and renderer.
To get the number of pages that were rendered by FOP you can call
Driver.getResults(). This returns a FormattingResults object
where you can lookup the number of pages produced. It also gives you the
page-sequences that were produced along with their id attribute and their
number of pages. This is particularly useful if you render multiple
documents (each enclosed by a page-sequence) and have to know the number of
pages of each document.
In the directory xml-fop/examples/servlet you can find a working example how to use FOP in a servlet. After building the servlet you can drop the fop.war into the webapps directory of Tomcat, then go to a URL like this:
http://localhost:8080/fop/fop?fo=/home/path/to/fofile.fo
http://localhost:8080/fop/fop?xml=/home/path/to/xmlfile.xml&xsl=/home/path/to/xslfile.xsl
The source code for the servlet can be found under xml-fop/examples/servlet/src/FopServlet.java.
The directory "xml-fop/examples/embedding" contains several working examples. In contrast of the examples above the examples here primarily use JAXP for XML access. This may be easier to understand for people familiar with JAXP.
This example demonstrates the basic usage pattern to transform an XSL-FO file to PDF using FOP.
This example has nothing to do with FOP. It is there to show you how an XML
file can be converted to XSL-FO using XSLT. The JAXP API is used to do the
transformation. Make sure you've got a JAXP-compliant XSLT processor in your
classpath (ex.
This example demonstrates how you can convert an arbitrary XML file to PDF using XSLT and XSL-FO/FOP. It is a combination of the first two examples above. The example uses JAXP to transform the XML file to XSL-FO and FOP to transform the XSL-FO to PDF.
The output (XSL-FO) from the XSL transformation is piped through to FOP using SAX events. This is the most efficient way to do this because the intermediate result doesn't have to be saved somewhere. Often, novice users save the intermediate result in a file, a byte array or a DOM tree. We strongly discourage you to do this if it isn't absolutely necessary. The performance is significantly higher with SAX.
This example is a preparatory example for the next one. It's an example that shows how an arbitrary Java object can be converted to XML. It's an often needed task to do this. Often people create a DOM tree from a Java object and use that. This is pretty straightforward. The example here however shows how to do this using SAX which will probably be faster and not even more complicated once you know how this works.
For this example we've created two classes: ProjectTeam and ProjectMember (found in xml-fop/examples/embedding/java/embedding/model). They represent the same data structure found in xml-fop/examples/embedding/xml/xml/projectteam.xml. We want to serialize a project team with several members which exist as Java objects to XML. Therefore we created the two classes: ProjectTeamInputSource and ProjectTeamXMLReader (in the same place as ProjectTeam above).
The XMLReader implementation (regard it as a special kind of XML parser)is responsible for creating SAX events from the Java object. The InputSource class is only used to hold the ProjectTeam object to be used.
Have a look at the source of ExampleObj2XML.java to find out how this is
used. For more detailed information see other resources on JAXP (ex.
The last example here combines the previous and the third to demonstrate how you can transform a Java object to a PDF directly in one smooth run by generating SAX events from the Java object that get fed to an XSL transformation. The result of the transformation is then converted to PDF using FOP as before.
These examples should give you an idea of what's possible. It should be easy to adjust these examples to your needs. For examples, you can use a DOMSource instead of a StreamSource to feed a DOM tree as input for an XSL transformation.
If you think you have a decent example that should be here, contact us via one of the mailing lists and we'll see to it that it gets added. Also, if you can't find the solution to your particular problem drop us a message on the fop-user mailing list.