FO Tree

| Introduction |
The FO Tree is an internal representation of the input FO document. The tree is created by building the elements and attributes from the SAX events. The FO Tree is used as an intermediatory structure which is converted into the area tree. The complete FO tree should not be held in memory since FOP should be able to handle FO documents of any size.
| FONode |
The class inheritance described above only describes the nature of the content. Every FO in FOP also has a parent, and a Vector of children. The parent attribute (in the Java sense), in particular, is used to enforce constraints required by the FO hierarchy. FONode, among other things, ensures that FO's have a parent, that they have children, that they maintain a marker of where the layout was up to (for FObj's it is the child number, and for FOText's it is the character number), and that they have a `layout()` method.
| Making FO's |
An FO maker is read from a hashmap lookup using the namespace and element name. This maker is then used to create a new class that represents an FO element. This is then added to the FO tree as a child of the current parent. Properties (recall that FO's have properties, areas have traits, and XML nodes have attributes) are also a concern of FOTreeBuilder. It accomplishes this by using a PropertyListBuilder. There is a separate PropertyListBuilder for each namespace encountered while building the FO tree. Each Builder object contains a hash of property names and their respective makers. It may also contain element-specific property maker hashes; these are based on the local name of the flow object, ie. table-row, not fo:table-row. If an element-specific property mapping exists, it is preferred to the generic mapping. The base class for all properties is Property, and all the property makers extend Property.Maker. A more complete discussion of the property architecture may be found in Properties.
| Foreign XML |
FOP supports the handlingof foreign XML. The XML is converted internally into a DOM, this is then available to the FO tree to convert the DOM into another format which can be rendered. In the case of SVG the DOM needs to be created with Batik, so an element mapping is used to read all elements in the SVG namespace and pass them into the Batik DOM.
| Extensions |
It is possible to add extensions to FOP so that you can extend the ability of FOP with respect to render output, document specific information or extended layout functionality.

Copyright © 1999-2002 The Apache Software Foundation. All Rights Reserved.