Re: RPGCGI - Convert HTML page to PDF

[Peter Connell <Peter.Connell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aaron,

Last year I successfully rolled out a PDF option, implemented using PD4ML, for the web response page of a primary service used by all production users who seem to like it.
Pages mostly take just a few seconds to transform and it still appears to be working well right from the get-go.
For about 100 Euros it has proved excellent and, although I have not downloaded more recent releases, the product site and support looks pretty good.
Read what follows only if you're interested.

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Installing PD4ML was essentially just adding the appropriate jar file to the java extension directory.
The actual implementation involved writing a server job with a data queue feed. 
One reason for a server job is that the PD4ML java implementation requires the property java.awt.headless=true which causes conflicts with any shell type PASE requests in the same job (which we use on occasion).

It is required that the html be available as a stream file.
The PDF transformation can be tested and run with a provided java command line standalone class by specifying stream files for html input and pdf output.

However, for efficiency I chose to invoke the java class from RPG so that the server job(s) had just a one-time startup performance hit for the JVM and also the PD4ML class load.
Determining the right class to invoke from RPG proved a little tedious but after searching the doco on the PD4ML site and a bit of googling this allowed me to write a short custom standalone java program as a wrapper.
The wrapper program means just a few lines of RPG to invoke the main class. While the wrapper class essentially just instantiates the PD4ML class and then runs the html.render method, it also allowed me to cut and paste in some java code I found on the web to set configurable attributes such as page width and insets. (I read about some sort of ini file configurator but that seemed to relate to a Websphere implementation)

Cheers, Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of TAllen@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, 26 February 2010 3:42 a.m.
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] RPGCGI - Convert HTML page to PDF

Aaron,

Look into iText.  It is Java-based so it will run on the i.
http://itextpdf.com/

Thanks,
Todd Allen
EDPS
Electronic Data Processing Services
tallen@xxxxxxxxxxxx



                                                                           
             Aaron Bartell                                                 
             <aaronbartell@gma                                             
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I have a customer that needs to take an auto insurance form that was built
with HTML and convert it to PDF so it can be emailed to the customer after
they write the policy.  The HTML is created and now I have been tasked with
converting it to PDF.

The main requirement is that everything must run on the IBMi which means I
am looking for a Java tool to accomplish this most likely.  There are a
number of tools out there (both free and commercial) and I am wondering if
others have attempted to do this and what you ended up choosing for a
solution.  Here are some of the solutions I am looking at right now:

http://pd4ml.com  - very simple API and very inexpensive (around $150 US
dollars)

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/06/26/generating-pdfs-with-flying-saucer-and-itext.html


http://www.allcolor.org/YaHPConverter/


Anybody have suggestions on what I have listed or other suggestions based
on
your experience?

Aaron Bartell
www.SoftwareSavesLives.com



 
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