Xpages PDF creation using the XMLWorker class - itext

Question

Using SSJS I've successfully created a PDF using the simple HTML parser that comes with iText but the simple HTML parser doesn't respect CSS and is very limited. I downloaded the XMLWorker class from the iText site and have tried to use that instead but my knowledge of working out how to call Java packages is too limited. All the examples I can find use Java and refer to the classes directly, eg.
Document newPDF = new Document();
But in SSJS we have to use dot notation, eg.
var newPDF:com.itextpdf.text.Document = new com.itextpdf.text.Document();
This - I think - is where I stumble. My code looks like this:
function createLPO2(pReqDoc:NotesDocument) {
importPackage(com.itextpdf);
//importPackage(com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper);
importPackage(java.io);
var con = facesContext.getExternalContext();
var response:com.ibm.xsp.webapp.XspHttpServletResponse = con.getResponse();
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
response.setDateHeader("Expires", -1);
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition","attachment; filename=\"LPO_" + pReqDoc.getItemValueString("RequisitionNo") + ".pdf\"");
var newPDF:com.itextpdf.text.Document = new com.itextpdf.text.Document();
var writer = com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfWriter.getInstance(newPDF,response.getOutputStream());
var xmlWorkerHelper = com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance();
var strHTML = getTestHTML(); //this is the HTML used in the examples on the iText site
xmlWorkerHelper.parseXHtml(writer, newPDF, new java.io.StringReader(strHTML));
newPDF.close();
writer.close();
facesContext.responseComplete();
}
If I run this script as it is I get a script error on the Domino console. If I remove the comment on the line importPackage(com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper); it gives a completely different error. I suspect I have to import the XMLWorkerHelper package and not just the com.itextpdf package. I thought if I opened the jar file using a tool like 7-zip I could work out the path, which is how I arrived at com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper
Is this right? If so, why does my script fail?

Answer 1

Rob,
seriously, don't try to do that in SSJS. iText is all Java, if you try to mangle with it in a different language it will stress you out. Create a wrapper class that has a method that takes an OutputStream and whatever data (Document, View etc) you need. Obtain the OutputStream in your SSJS and call the function. Look for the XAgent XSnippet on OpenNTF and my blog series (the last two are missing - bear with me) on PDF creation.
One word of caution: iText is GPL, so you either GPL your software too, buy a commercial iText license or look for alternatives like Apache PDFBox or Apache FOP. Ah the second caution: HTML to PDF is a Pita. You could look at a commercial tool like e.g. from Swing software (or change your approach)