Other XML Technologies - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 253

formatter for final processing. If your XSL-FO document doesn't contain any errors,
a PDF is produced.
Performing the final XSL-FO transformation is trivial. We assume here that the XSL-
FO document creation is already complete and that the final XSL-FO document is
available from somewhere in the database. The following example transforms this
document to PDF and displays it in your browser:
let $ xsl-fo-document as document-node () := doc ( 'some-xsl-fo.xml' )
let $ media-type as xs:string := 'application/pdf'
return
response:stream-binary (
xslfo:render ( $ xsl-fo-document , $ media-type , ()),
$ media-type ,
'output.pdf'
)
The xslfo:render function does the trick: it transforms the XSL-FO instructions
into a (binary, xs:base64binary ) PDF document and returns this. This is picked up
by response:stream-binary , which sends it to your browser. Because the Internet
media type is set to application/pdf , it will (hopefully) show up as a nicely format‐
ted PDF document. There is an example in the accompanying source code (see
“Accompanying Source Code” on page 15 ) that does exactly this.
The parameters for the xslfo:render function are:
$document as node()
The XSL-FO document to render.
$mime-type as xs:string
The requested output's Internet media type. In most cases this will be applica
tion/pdf . Please refer to your XSL-FO formatter's documentation to find out if
other Internet media types are supported also.
$parameters as node()
Parameters to pass to the formatter. The format, a parameter element with param
children, is exactly the same as that used for passing parameters to an XSLT
transformation (see “Passing XSLT Parameters” on page 241 ). Recognized ren‐
dering parameters are author , title , keywords , and dpi .
$config-file as node() (optional)
An optional formatter configuration file. Please refer to your XSL-FO formatter's
documentation for more information about this.