Document viewing in rich clients

[adepue]

I have a question for other rich client developers... with the move away from the browser and to the rich client platform, how do you handle document viewing? As our app scope grows, we have come to a requirement where documents can be associated with an object... the ideal would be to seamlessly pull up those documents in the rich client, or at least launch the appropriate application (though this last one is not preferred). With documents ranging from HTML (URLs), to PDFs and Word .doc files, how would you approach this? Are we going to have to break down and include some sort of native integration? Is there even a commercial Java library available to facilitate viewing these various document formats? The rich client application has provided us with numerous benefits over a web app - but this one area seems to be a web app strength that is currently hard to match in rich client (especially Java) land.. or am I wrong?

Thanks for any tips,
Andy

[oliverhutchison]

Andy,

Spring Rich ships with a nice utility class BrowserLauncher (the name is a bit misleading) which allows you to open URLs using the system default applications (at least it does on Windows on Mac not sure about Linux). Try something like this:

    BrowserLauncher.openURL(new URL("file://c:/somedir/somepdfile.pdf"));

AFAIK if you want document imbedding you need to use the SWT OLE support which basically rules out Spring Rich and any other platform but windows.

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Arti...0in%20SWT.html

Another option if you're willing to put up with launching the system default application is JDIC (it also allows you to imbed the system default browser and do other desktop related stuff like tray icons etc..).

https://jdic.dev.java.net/

HTH

Ollie

[oliverhutchison]

Just found this nice little example using SWT OLE show a powerpoint document.

http://jroller.com/page/mpermar/2004..._ms_powerpoint

[snpe]

I make report/document from database and preview it with JFreeReport www.jfree.org

regards

[adepue]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Snpe, how does JFreeReport compare to Jasper Reports?

Thanks,
Andy

[snpe]

I choose JFreeReport because have more output format and it is better for programatic report
I don't know can JasperReprot work withou xml file - it is not big problem, but I want make generic programatic report.Except this, JFreeReport create report from TableModel and I have TableModel for my data

regards