XI: Generate PDF file out of file adapter

While going through the SDN forum, I saw, some of us wanted to know how to generate a PDF file out of receiver file adapter in XI. While ideas from other SDN members include Java mapping or proxies, here we will see how to use the Module Processor to do the conversion job.

The advantage of using module processor exit is its flexibility to take variables in configuration, instead of hard coding as with mapping program or proxies

In the below example, we receive a simple XML file and transform it to XSL FO format using XSLT mapping. Then we use FOP (download source from Apache FOP ) for converting the XSL-FO to PDF format

Design

Target schema is available in the source FOP directory srcfoschema, which was downloaded from apache.org. But this needs to be tweaked to upload successfully in XI. You can download the tweaked version from FOP XSD

Configuration

On the receiver file adapter, we will use a module processor exit bean. The code snippet for the processor bean is provided below

</p> <p>public ModuleData process(  ModuleContext moduleContext,  ModuleData inputModuleData)  throws ModuleException {   Object obj = null;   Message msg = null;  try {   obj = inputModuleData.getPrincipalData();   msg = (Message) obj;   XMLPayload xmlpayload = msg.getDocument();   if (xmlpayload != null) {    byte by[] = convert(xmlpayload);       xmlpayload.setContent(by);    }  }  catch (Exception e) {   ModuleException me = new ModuleException(e);   throw me;  }  return inputModuleData; } public byte[] convert(XMLPayload xmlpayload) throws Exception {      byte[] content = null;           try {              Driver driver = new Driver();    driver.setRenderer(Driver.RENDER_PDF);        ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();    driver.setOutputStream(out);    driver.setInputSource(new InputSource(xmlpayload.getInputStream()));                driver.run();                        content = out.toByteArray();       }  catch (Exception e) {}  //return xmldata.getBytes();  return content;  }</p> <p>

This module references the following jar files fop.jar, avalon-framework-cvs-20020806.jar, batik.jar, xalan-2.4.1.jar, xercesImpl-2.2.1.jar and xml-apis.jar. These jar files are available in the build and lib directory of FOP download

That’s it. You are now ready to test your interface. Data transfer using PDF offers various benefits on security and data integrity. By using Java cryptology, you can also encrypt the PDF file and secure it with a password for additional security

In my next blog, I will talk about how to build a module for reading content from a PDF file, in the sender adapter