dotnet xml: Hi!

We want to use XSL-FO in the reporting of our application. Before making the
decision we have some questions on that topic:

Does anyone have experience with XSL-FO in the .NET environment? Is that a
useful technique for professional reporting? Is it technically mature?

Does anyone know of a control (WinForms/WebForms) that we can use to show
the formatted XSL-FO data?

Are there any .NET-libraries that can be used to convert XSL-FO to pdf?

Thanks in advance,

Markus

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Hi Markus

XSL-FO in .Net is still quite new. As far as I know, your options for
renderers are the following:

Antenna House http://www.antennahouse.com
An excellent windows based renderer, have a look on their web site for .net
support? The eval has a windowed viewer, so they may have a control that you
can embed. Also does pdf output. (Commercial)

Apoc XSLFO http://www.chive.com/
This is a port of the Apache FOP renderer, and according to their website
they have made some significant speed improvements which was a limiting
factor when using the java version for reporting. (Commercial)

FOP C# port http://sourceforge.net/projects/fop-dotnet/
I have no idea how far this project is, but it's free. Should be able to pdf
output

As a reporting tool, XSL FO is quite handy provided that the following are
taken into account:
1. Most of the number crunching must be done before your data gets into XML,
because XSLT 1.0 has quite a few limitations.
2. It is very suitable for short document and letter type of reporting,
because it is designed for flows of text with inline formatted content. Most
normal sql query type of reporting products are a bit limited in this
regard.
3. It's slow! Now before all the XSLFO vendors flame me, it cannot compare
to the sql query reporting products for speed, it is text based. Don't
expect to be printing large batches of reports or 100+ page stock
inventories.
4. Assuming that you have a good quality renderer, the output should be very
professional and you can get very precise layouts.

Hope this helps
Colin


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Hi Oleg,

I saw on your blog a while back you were experimenting with WordML. Do you
think a xsl-fo to wordml stylesheet is feasible?

I looked at the office 2k3 beta 2 implementation of wordml, but the xsd
schema that comes with the dev kit doesn't seem to match what msword
produces. It references another namespace for which the xsd is not provided.

I didn't spend a lot of time on it, does msword handle pagination of text
flows that span multiple pages automatically?

Colin

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also nFop.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfop/

another freebie.


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Well, XSL-FO itself is mature enough, but it suffers from lack of good (and
cheap) implementations. Things are changing, but quite slowly.

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Ibex XSL-FO Formatter (http://xmlpdf.com) looks good.
My favorite is AntennaHouse XSL Formatter (http://antennahouse.com), but it's
quite expensive and COM-based.
--
Oleg Tkachenko
http://www.tkachenko.com/blog
Multiconn Technologies, Israel

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I hope so.

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Still can't say nothing as have no time to get familiar enough with WordML :(
--
Oleg Tkachenko
http://www.tkachenko.com/blog
Multiconn Technologies, Israel

Hi!

Thanks for your replies, they were very helpful,

Markus

"Markus Wildgruber" <msdngroups@syska.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:OMopxiyhDHA.336@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
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I to am a big fan of the Antenna House formatter. I have been using it
for over a year. It is up to snuff with the latest standards, and a new
release 3.0 has just come out. It is 4 times faster at rendering PDF
files than the previous version. It can handle more than 5000 pages at
a time.

The 3.0 release has a .NET native interface that is C# based, as well as
COM+ and Java interfaces.

I am currently using it from a web service, that I wrote around the 2.5
COM+ components. 3.0 has combined the formatter and PDF generation into
a single component, which is much more convenient.

The 3.0 product does not ship with a GUI like the 2.5 product, but the
3.1 release will be ship with a re-worked GUI.

All in all I think that for the money (it ain't cheap) that you will not
find a better FOP formatter. One other thing that I forgot to mention
is the fact that their technical support is stellar.

Mike Mlachak
Sales & Marketing
International Truck & Engine


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As it should be with a price tag like that.

Eirik M

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