Graham McCall - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 10:42 AM:
Does anybody out there have experience converted AML directly to PDF probably via XSL FO rather than the standard Aras AML to HTML report via XSLT??
Goal is a fairly complex report with much more control over pagination... which is of course tricky with HTML..
Look for people's experience and maybe some samples..
Graham
RobMcAveney - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 12:03 PM:
Hi Graham -
I don't have any direct experience with this, but it should definitely be possible. I can see a couple of challenges, though. There are currently 3 locations available for reports: Client, Server and Service. Service reports are pretty closely tied to Reporting Services and Server reports are always expected to return HTML, so that leaves you with Client. Since .NET does not have native support for XSL-FO, you would have to link in a third party library like FO.NET to do the transform. Of course, you'd want that library on the server, which means your client-side report will have to do some extra work to get to it. My suggestion would be to use a client-side report with target=none and a Javascript method that opens a window pointing to a URL. The URL would be a custom ASPX page that accepts the necessary parameters, does the XSL-FO transform and returns the PDF file.
If there's enough interest in this, Aras might be able to make it easier to return non-HTML report content to the client. Anyone else using a reporting technique that might benefit from this?
Rob
