« Posts tagged xslt

Apache XSL-FO’ sho v1.0

August 2, 2010 / posted in Java / No Comments

Transforming XML into PDFs.. and stuff

If you’ve ever been tasked with providing PDF documents via xsl, you’ve surely done some homework and shopped around for viable third party libraries. Some are good, some are great and rightly so charge a price, and some are just flat out incomplete or shanty in their documentation. It’s not a knock on anyone, its just a fact well known to open source developers. Historically what has been missing is an open standard for pdf generation, and possibly other output formats.

Enter XSL-FO: XSL Formatting Objects is an open standard for formatting documents in…

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Transforming XML into MS Excel XML

February 9, 2010 / posted in xml / No Comments

MS Excel understands XML?

If you need to export xml to a Microsoft Excel friendly format, you could stress over the HSSF (Horrible Spread Sheet Format, for the uninitiated) format with apache’s POI framework or you could transform your xml into an format Excel understands. This approach will allow you to decorate your cells with stylized fonts and borders; what it will not allow you to do is create or add complex objects like charts, graphs or pictures. This xml format is a watered down version of excel. If you require the ability to embed images, graphs…

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5 ways to make XML more XPath friendly

January 19, 2010 / posted in Technobable, xml / No Comments

As java developers we should always do what we can to optimize outbound xml from our side of the fence. I mean, its our job to build and design awesome, elegant and efficient software whenever possible right? We have our data and we want to serialize it into xml, how can we make our xml as efficient and xpath friendly as possible?

1) Keep the structure simple

Consolidate data nodes whenever possible before marshaling your object into xml. You really don’t want to have to resort to using xpath for any unnecessary lookups across nodes. Keep those lookups confined to…

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All things XPath

January 10, 2010 / posted in Technobable, xml / No Comments

What’s XPath?

So XPath is really just a means of accessing data on xml nodes. XML has structure, with node and branches and attributes; XPath is the notation we use to express which nodes, branches or attributes we want to access. XSL makes use of this notation in order to change the structure and layout of an XML document. The process of changing one form of xml into another is called an XSL Transformation, or xslt for short.

The Basics!

If you’ve ever laid out a web page, YOU ALREADY KNOW XPATH! More specifically, if you have ever used…

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