European Customs Union: Dynamic Reports for Web and Print Applications

Using an XEP Engine and CSSToXSLFO approach insulates report programmers from both XSLT and XSL FO (XSLFO), resulting in a higher productivity with no need to for additional training.

At the European Customs Union, developers were writing JSPs containing XHTML to produce various forms for the web. XEP Engine was integrated into this environment using servlet and a filter implemented to convert the XHTML response to PDF. This servlet also calls the XEP version of CSSToXSLFO.

The developers also use it in the reporting service which is mostly employed by batch jobs that produce rather large reports with a tabular layout. These batch jobs in fact generate XHTML, which is again converted with CSSToXSLFO.

This approach insulates report programmers from both XSLT and XSL FO (XSLFO), making them much more productive. This is possible because CSS covers the needs in terms of formatting and can be automatically translated into XSL FO (XSLFO) and then to PDF.