[seam-dev] Ideas for a replacement of the seam 2 PDF tags/engine in a CDI/JSF 2.0 world?

[Denis Forveille]

What thing we like in seam 2 is the pdf engine based on JSF components taylored for iText

As we are moving to CDI, we a re looking for an equivalent engine to produce PDF reports

Seam 3 does not seem to have such an engine ready

Flyingsaucer (http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer) is almost doing this except that it uses plain JSF/faelets tags, not specific 
iText tags/components

I'm thinking on writing such an engine, based on reusing the seam2 JSF-iText tags/components and on the principle described here:
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/10/31/combine-facelets-and-flying-saucer-renderer.html

ie:
- write an xhtml report  with the seam 2 JSF/iText tags/components exactly as in seam 2

At runtime, have a filter that intercepts the request for such a PDF document (based on extension or request parameter), forward the 
request to the JSF engine as a standard request to compose the response
   -> the tags will generate a iText document and attach it  in a scoped variable
- the filter read the iText object, and read send it to the reponse object
or
use something similar to  what ios described here for rendering the response programatically : http://www.bradchen.com/node/36


This engine would obviously depends on JSF and iText, and maybe on CDI

Does this already exist?

WDYT?