Application Express | Andre Spannig | weblog about web development

Oracle APEX / FOP / Cocoon: Invalid characters in XML data

05/2010 // Category: Application Express, FOP, Tomcat/Cocoon, XML, XSL-FO

The setup is Oracle APEX with Tomcat / Cocoon as XSL-FO processor to generate PDF reports.

PDF reports in some cases do not open, instead in Acrobat (Reader) you are presented with an error message that Acrobat could not open the file because it is either damaged or not a supported file type.

If file size of the XML data sent from APEX to the print server is not an issue, another reason might be that you have an invalid character in your XML file.

Turn on debug in APEX to see the error message sent back from Cocoon.

:| { Tags: APEX, Cocoon, illegal character, XML }

Printing PDF reports in Oracle APEX

04/2010 // Category: APEX, Application Express, FOP, Oracle, XSL-FO

Available solutions

PDF printing in Oracle Application Express requires an externally defined print server. When the user clicks a print link in Application Express, then the APEX engine generates the corresponding report data in XML format and a report template in XSL-FO or RTF format.

Your report server can be Oracle BI Publisher, OC4J with Apache FOP or another standard XSL-FO processing engine. While BI Publisher provides higher level of functionality, associated licensing costs are high. Standard configuration may be implemented with Apache FOP or another standard XSL-FO processing engine. Beginning with Application Express 3.0.1, a supported configuration of Apache FOP in conjunction with Oracle Containers for J2EE (10.1.3.2) is included, which also requires a license. BI Publisher and Apache FOP / Oracle Containers for J2EE are supported by Oracle.