XML Publisher - Overview

Of late I have been working a lot on XML Publisher. On the consulting side, most reports are being dished out using XML Publisher, or at least the Layout part using most of the current RDF for XML data.
However, most of the presentations or documents on XML Publisher are more like sales or feature presentations. There isn't a real good how-to-do document that actually takes beginners or first time users of XML Publisher through its different capabilities. So as part of my own learning process, I created my very own "XML Publisher for Dummies", a book that I used to document different ways of using XML Pub.

I am going to share some basic and simple codes samples to exploit XML Publisher capabilities. So here we go.

XML Publisher is a powerful product, (though it still has some of its own problems ) that can be used to bind that data set,generated in many ways, to a template. We can create XML data using existing RDF or PL/SQL or Java program or any other source. We can also use the Java XML Publisher APIs for that and much much more.

Here is what XML Pub is from a very simplistic point of view :


XML Publisher is made up of the following core API components:

1) PDF Form Processing Engine The PDF Form Processing Engine creates a PDF document by merging a PDF template with an XML data file.
oracle.apps.xdo.template.FormProcessor;

2) RTF Processor Engine The RTF processor engine takes an RTF template as input. The processor parses the template and creates an XSL-FO template, which can be used input to the FO Engine.
oracle.apps.xdo.template.RTFProcessor;

3) FO Processor Engine
The FO Processor Engine is XML Publisher’s implementation of the W3C XSL-FO
standard. It does not represent a complete implementation of every XSL-FO
component. The FO Processor Merges XSL and XML to produce following output formats: Excel (HTML), PDF, RTF, or HTML.from either of the following two inputs:
• Template (XSL) and Data (XML) combination
• FO object

oracle.apps.xdo.template.FOProcessor;

4) PDF Document Merger The PDF Document Merger class provides a set of utilities to manipulate PDF documents. These utilities provide optional postprocessing of PDF files to merge documents, add page numbering, and set watermarks.
oracle.apps.xdo.common.pdf.util.PDFDocMerger;

5) eText Processor
Converts RTF eText templates to XSL and merges the XSL with XML to produce text
output for EDI and EFT transmissions.

6) Document Processor Engine (XML APIs)
Provides batch processing functionality to access a single API or multiple APIs by
passing a single XML file to specify template names, data sources, languages, output
type, output names, and destinations.