Re: Printing XML reports

Robert C. Lyons wrote:


> I know that I can convert the XML reports to FO documents
> and use an FO processor (e.g., FOP, FO2PDF, etc.)
> to convert them to PDF files.
> 
> Has anyone had success doing this?
> Do these FO processors run fast enough, so that my 
> web server can can convert the XML reports to PDF
> on demand?

It depends on how demanding are your clients, and on the size
of your files. As you know, proper XSL FO formatting implies 
a large amount of calculations, performed globally on the whole 
text; so the procedure is not straightfroward, and relatively slow. 

To give you some hints, I have run a preliminary benchmark
of our formatter, FO2PDF, on different kinds of documents.

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/linebreak.fo
1 page, complex character-level formatting.
FO - 55 kB, PDF - 59 kB, time - 7 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/color.fo
2 pages, about twenty simple tables.
FO - 34 kB, PDF - 43 kB, time - 11 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/tables-as-tables.fo
1 page, one complex table with spanning, footnotes, etc.
FO - 27 kB, PDF - 28 kB, time - 11 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/hammer/hammer.fo
5 pages, two columns, few simple tables, images.
FO - 34 kB, PDF - 92 kB, time - 16 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/xmlspec/xmlnames.fo
11 pages - XML Names specification.
FO - 98 kB, PDF - 133 kB, time - 40 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/xmlspec/xpath.fo
28 pages - XPath specification.
FO - 311 kB, PDF - 401 kB, time - 2 min 05 sec

http://www.renderx.com/Tests/xmlspec/xslt.fo
68 pages - XSLT specification.
FO - 495 kB, PDF - 740 kB, time - 3 min 35 sec

All measurements were made on a Pentium III-500 
machine, 256 MB RAM, running Windows NT. 

To draw a conclusion: for reports up to 10-20 pages,
it is plausible to format them on demand for a dozen
clients a day. However, there's little chance to use the formatter
for converting documents on the fly on heavily loaded sites,
unless your data change seldom and you implement an efficient
caching scheme.

Best regards,
Nikolai


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