Template Toolkit: Better way to call FOP

holli has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Lately I am playing with the Template Toolkit. My task is to create XSL-FO using the toolkit and create PDF out of it's output via Apache's FOP.

I have a working solution but it looks clumsy to me. There should be a better way.

#!perl
my $t=Template->new 
( 
    INCLUDE_PATH => 'c:/', 
    COMPILE_DIR  =>"c:/tt", 
    FILTERS      => 
    { 
        fop => sub 
        { 
            open OUT, ">tmpf"; 
            print OUT @_; 
            close OUT;
            
            $_ = `fop -fo tmpf -pdf test.pdf`; 
            
            unlink "tmpf";
            
            return $_;
        }
    }
);
#....
[download]

The template:

[%- FILTER fop -%]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">

[%# do stuff %]

[% END %]
[download]

holli, /regexed monk/

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Re: Template Toolkit: Better way to call FOP by runrig (Abbot) on Jul 14, 2005 at 17:39 UTC
Since fop is all java (and there's a fop.jar), it should be possible to use Inline::Java to call the fop API directly instead of using the fop commandline utility, where you may be able to pass in a file handle (there is a "embedding" doc in the FOP distribution). There is also XML::ApacheFOP, but I don't think it accepts STDIN or other filehandles as input arguments...it might be worthwhile to research seeing if that could be made to work.	[reply]
Re: Template Toolkit: Better way to call FOP by blazar (Canon) on Jul 14, 2005 at 16:50 UTC
IIUC and if fop accepts output from STDIN, then you may be interested in IPC::Open2.	[reply]