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First source code submit

The FormLayouts library pourpose is to provide an easy and flexibe way to build form layouts based on flat PDF files so that content data may be written upon it.
This libray is not intended to be a reporting tool (hhere are others), but simply a way to fill and render fixed format forms, such as application forms and such.

Form Layouts are defined in XML (The libray may be extended for aditional data source types),
and comprise the folowing items:
* Form layout Name and description
* Form template (pure graphical contents) PDF file;
* Named fields, defining content type (java class) and output format, label and description;
* Static text contents;
* Definition of named, reusable field types;
* Field and static context may be assigned style (font, size, color, ...)
* Definition of named, reusable Styles.

Based on this specification FormLayout objects are created.
This object provides the folowing methods for obtaining matadata:
* getting the Form name and description
* The list of assignable fields and names, their labels and descriptions.

This metadata may be used for dinamically build Screens to fill the Form data.

Form Layout objects have a method for creating Form Instances, which are the ones that will be filled and rendered to produce the output.

PDF rendering and manipulation is handled by the iText (package (http://www.lowagie.com/iText/).

Jakarta Commons' Dynabeans will be used to wrap Form Instances, as DynaClasses will be used to wrap Form Layouts,
to make easy integrating this library with the Struts framework.

It was recently commited to the CVS repository the first publicized version of the code. It is not yet fully functional, i am still focusing in loading te Form Layout objects from its XML specification.
Interested people may want to browse the sources to get a feeling of what the software will be.

Posted by João Cardoso 2005-05-12

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