Orbeon Search

Comments? Feedback?

This wiki does not yet support public comments (a limitation of Google Sites), so we encourage you to post your comments either:

On Twitter by responding to @orbeon.

On our community mailing list: subscribe sending an email to ops-users-subscribe@ow2.org (content of subject/body doesn't matter), you'll get a response with the email to use to send your message to the community mailing list.

Recent site activity

XPL - Command Line Applications

Contents

  1. 1 Introduction
  2. 2 Command line interface
  3. 3 Examples

Introduction

You can use Orbeon Forms to build standalone command-line applications running pipelines. Use cases include: creating a hardcopy of a web site, importing or exporting XML data to and from a relational database, testing pipelines, automating repetitive operations on XML files (selection, transformation, aggregation, etc.). Orbeon Forms becomes your "XML toolbox".

Command line interface

Orbeon Forms ships with a command line interface (CLI). The easiest way to run it is to use the executable orbeon-cli.jar file and pass it a pipeline file:

java -jar orbeon-cli.jar pipeline.xpl

In this case, a pipeline can use relative URLs, or, if using absolute URLs, can use either the file: protocol to access files or, equivalently, the oxf: protocol.

Sometimes, it is better to group files under a resources sandbox addressed by the oxf: protocol. This is the standard way of accessing resources (files) within web applications, but it is also useful with command-line applications. In such cases, specify a resource manager root directory with the -r option, for example:

java -jar orbeon-cli.jar -r . oxf:/pipeline.xpl

or:

java -jar orbeon-cli.jar -r C:/my-example oxf:/pipeline.xpl

When specifying a resource manager root directory, it is mandatory to use a protocol and an absolute path within the sandbox, as shown above.

[Since 2012-05-29] Pipeline inputs and outputs can be specified as URLs using --input (aka -i) and --output (aka -o) options:

java -jar orbeon-cli.jar -i "data1=oxf:/data1.xml" -i "data2=oxf:/data2.xml" -o "data=oxf:/data.xml" -r C:/my-example oxf:/pipeline.xpl


NOTE: Orbeon Forms's jar file (orbeon-cli.jar) is executable via the java -jar mechanism. However, it depends on a number of libraries that must be in the 'lib' directory beneath the directory containing orbeon-cli.jar. It is recommended to expand the WAR file, and refer to the orbeon-cli.jar file under the WAR file's WEB-INF directory.

Examples

Orbeon Forms comes with simple examples of command-line applications under the src/examples/cli directory. To run those examples, from a command prompt, enter either one of the subdirectories and run the java command following the explanations above, for example, from the simple directory:

java -jar /path/to/orbeon-war/WEB-INF/orbeon-cli.jar stdout.xpl

or, from the transform directory:

java -jar /path/to/orbeon-war/WEB-INF/orbeon-cli.jar transform.xpl

Notice that those two example pipelines use serializers, for example: 

<p:config xmlns:p="http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/pipeline" xmlns:oxf="http://www.orbeon.com/oxf/processors">

    <p:processor name="oxf:xslt">
        <p:input name="data" href="foo.xml"/>
        <p:input name="config" href="foo.xsl"/>
        <p:output name="data" id="result"/>
    </p:processor>

    <p:processor name="oxf:xml-serializer">
        <p:input name="config">
            <config/>
        </p:input>
        <p:input name="data" href="#result"/>
    </p:processor>

</p:config>

It is important to note that, when running from within a servlet or portlet environment, serializers send their data to the web client, such as a web browser. When running from a command-line environment, serializers output data to the standard output.