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Generating XSL-FO Layouts with Microsoft Word and Apache POI

· 3 min read
Adrian Png
Adrian Png
Director of Innovation, AI and Cloud Solutions @ Insum, a Talan Company

The objective of this post is to describe how to create XSL-FO Layouts with little or no costs! These can then be used for custom PDF documents printing in Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Let's get started...

Tools that you will need:

  1. Microsoft Word 97 and up.
  2. Apache POI binaries.

Step 1​

Design your report template using Microsoft Word and populate the document with variable placeholders. Design the form/report

Step 2​

Save this template as a Word 97-2003 document.

Step 3​

Download the latest Apache POI binaries. At the time of writing, the latest version is 3.9 and the utility needed is still under development. The two Java library (jar) files are highlighted. Files in Apache POI

Step 4​

Extract the package and change the current directory to the folder the files were extracted to.

Step 5​

For convenience, copy/move the template document to the same directories as the Java libraries.

Step 6​

Perform the Word to FO conversion. Enter the command as highlighted. Executing the Word-to-FO Conversion Process

Step 7​

The contents of the FO file should be something similar to this: Sample Contents

Step 8​

Place the contents of this file - stuff between the <fo:root> element - within a transformation template. XSLT Template

Note: If Oracle BI Publisher is used to generate the PDFs, then remove the and any child elements within. Consulting the docs for supported elements would be helpful.

Step 9​

Replace the placeholders defined in the Word document with elements. Placeholders to be replaced

Use XPath to select the values from the XML data file generated by APEX. Embedding Query Results using XPath

Step 10​

Images would be removed and replaced by a placeholder comment tag. Image Placeholder

Step 11​

Include the image file as <fo:external-graphic> elements. Adding an External Graphic

Step 12​

Save the file with an XML extension. To see this template in action, click on the "Print" button here.

Known Issue: The graphics element renders correctly when using Oracle APEX Listener 2.0 embedded Apache FOP print rendering engine, but not on apex.oracle.com, which uses Oracle BI Publisher. I am still trying to figure out why and if you do know the reason, I'd be happy if you could share it with me. Thanks! :-)