Chapter 5. Producing Tabular Reports
In this chapter, we will create a library that will help application developers to create tabular reports using a custom Document Object Model (DOM), created for this purpose. The tree-structured document object model will be traversed to produce output in the Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) and HTML format. Support for new target formats would be seamless, with developers writing handlers for those. For PDF output, we plan to use the open source iTextSharp library. During the course of this chapter, as a reader, you will learn the following:
- Defining an object model for documents
- The composite pattern for modeling part/whole relationship
- Producing PDF documents by leveraging the iTextSharp library
- The visitor pattern and composite object traversal