Document management in Seam 3 ?

[yanmania]

I like Excel and Pdf integration in seam 2.

Will it be possible to generate these kind of files from xhtml ?
Will it be possible to export Excel worksheets from JSF dataTables ?

[lightguard]

We have wanted to do these together in one module (probably called Documents) but we have been blocked by the PDF portion. With the relicensing of iText we've been looking for something else to take it's place but have yet to find something that fits well. I know we've looked into pdfbox for sure and possibly some others (not sure exactly what has been looked into atm). There may be a few other options out there or maybe we'll have to go down the path of using xml:fo. If you have ideas / options, please let us know.

For the Excel portion, we probably could proceed, much like the way the Mail module is going with supporting multiple templating engines. Please look through the Mail module (http://seamframework.org/Seam3/MailModule) and give us your feedback, we may be able to pull out some commonalities there and create a base for the document / mail generation modules.

[aareshchanka]

What kind of JSF 2 components are you using?

Primefaces have very good export from datatables:

http://www.primefaces.org/showcase-labs/ui/exporter.jsf

[yanmania]

For PDF generation, I noticed that JasperReport was the tool I needed. I cannot really help on finding another library like iText because I do not have a great experience about PDF (sorry).

For Excel generation, I cannot say. I liked writing XHTML file to generate Excel file but the template could be a good idea...

@Alexandr : thank you for the tip.

[andrewwheeler]

If I had a vote on the issue I'd integrate apache FOP. It is a fairly complete solution for generating PDF documents from markup language. Integrate it with facelets UI and EL and it would become very powerful. Why write another PDF template markup language when a standard already exists? Some might argue that it is overly verbose and complex, but some of that could be hidden away with some smart templating.

[elfuhrer]

Andew +1 for Apache FOP, as a matter of fact Apache FOP was always a preference over iText, probably it's time to start the migration. Now regarding the module design, would it be something like the one in Seam 2? and generating the tags would be based on a custom tag library?

[lbbishop.lbbishop.comcast.net]

The lack of a Documents module in Seam 3 is stopping me from migrating my applications from Seam 2 to Seam 3. Has any decision been made regarding FOP vs iText? Would developer (me) contribution be of use in this endeavour.

[lightguard]

Luke Bishop wrote on May 17, 2011 15:32:


The lack of a Documents module in Seam 3 is stopping me from migrating my applications from Seam 2 to Seam 3. Has any decision been made regarding FOP vs iText? Would developer (me) contribution be of use in this endeavour.

iText is out because of the license. Please get it touch with George Gastaldi who's working on the Reports module.