Can fo:external-graphic refer to image URLs?

[Jocelyn Paine <po...@pop3.ifs.org.uk>]

I notice that in all the examples I've seen, the src attribute of
fo:external-graphic points at a file. Can it refer to a URL? I wish to
generate PDF pages which contain lots of graphs. These graphs are
dynamically generated by a servlet which takes a URL containing the
data points in its query parameters, plots the graph on the spot, and
streams it back. So one of our URLs might look like
  http://oursite/plotter/?points=1,2;3,4;5,6&caption=Growth&size=small

I've just tried this with FOP 0.20.1 and get back a dodgy looking error
message: Reference to entity "points" must end with the ';' delimiter.
This suggests quite strongly that it doesn't know how to parse URLs. (The
URL is a bit longer than the example above, and contains some escaped
characters, but it is valid and understood by both Netscape and IE.)

Of course, to be able to convert such dynamic URLs, FOP would need to make
an HTTP connection with the server and download the image, but that ought
to be possible.

Jocelyn Paine
http://www.ifs.org.uk/~popx/
+44 (0)7768 534 091 



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: fop-dev-unsubscribe@xml.apache.org
For additional commands, email: fop-dev-help@xml.apache.org