Product Overview

Built on our popular Java PDF library, the Report Writer adds substantial functionality:

• HTML-style Tables - auto-sized nested tables with full control over padding, margins and borders
• Use cascading CSS2 stylesheets to control look and feel
• Create inline graphs and charts with XML, direct from the database (using version 1 of our Graph Library)
• Includes a servlet and a servlet filter for simple generation of PDFs from XML or JSP pages.
• Auto pagination of content with page headers and footers
• Familiar HTML syntax - <a>, <ul>, <p>, <table>, <td> and so on - simpler and faster than FOP.
• All the features of our PDF library - Unicode support, Encryption, TrueType fonts, Barcodes, PDF 2.0 support and more

Extended Edition

Like our PDF Library, we offer an extended version of the Report Generator which has the following features:

• Load existing PDF documents as templates
• Digitally sign documents
• Create and edit interactive Forms, or "AcroForms"

Java PDF Viewer

The Viewer available with the PDF library can be added to the Report Generator as well, giving you the ability to rasterize and display PDFs as well as create them. See the PDF Library page for more details on the viewer.

Product Benefits

BFOs Java Reporting tool provides some of the most comprehensive and advanced XML to PDF conversion on the market. As our XML is based on XHTML and uses CSS the learning curve is drastically reduced - report designers don't have to learn an entirely new grammar, so are up and running quicker.

The "two-stage" system of first generating the XML and then converting it to PDF means you can generate XML with any tool, although JSPs are the natural choice. This means you have access to the full range of Tag Libraries designed for JSP. Database connectivity is all taken care of before the XML conversion begins, so you can use whatever method you prefer to get your information from the backend into XML. The whole process is remarkably simple.

Customers using the BFO Report Generator say:

• "Talk about return on investment. Man hours alone that have been saved!! I think that the Bank of Montreal will be a very long term and satisfied customer" - Bank of Montreal
• "The price was far less than I expected" - KPMG
• "The quality of the software and the support is outstanding" - KTB
• "BFO authors solid, reliable products and can readily be depended on to deliver first class solutions" - Configure One

Free Trial

Download Free Trial

To use the package, you will need at least Java 1.4 and a SAX parser installed and running on your system. The package uses no native code and will run easily from EJB's or Servlets on Windows, Unix or any other system running Java 1.4 or greater.