Using IKVM to convert a JAR (Flying Saucer - xhtmlrenderer)

Question

I wanted to use the Flying Saucer Java API in .NET so I tried to use IKVM to convert the Flying Saucer library:

ikvmc core-renderer.jar

For some reason, IKVMC gave me an exe core-renderer.exe so I renamed it to core-renderer.dll, added to my assemblies and hacked away

using java.io;
using java.lang;
using com.lowagie.text;
using org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf;

namespace flying_saucer
{
    class FlyingSaucerApp
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // This works
            DocumentException dummy = new DocumentException();

            ITextRenderer renderer = new ITextRenderer();


            // For some reason, this raises NoClassDefFoundError                
            renderer.setDocument(File("hello.xhtml").toURI().toURL().toString());
        }
    }
}

For some reason, it is giving java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.lowagie.text.DocumentException. I realized DocumentException is something ITextRender() may throw, but I've already included com.lowagie.text, any ideas?

Answer 1

Make sure you've included IKVM.AWT.WinForms.dll, IKVM.OpenJDK.ClassLibrary.dll, IKVM.Runtime.dll and IKVM.Runtime.JNI.dll assemblies into your project. Also to avoid generating an executable and then renaming it you could specify the -target:library switch when compiling.

Answer 2

It turned out that for this particular situation, I needed to render both Flying Saucer and iText (a dependency of Flying Saucer) and have the Flying Saucer assembly reference to its dependency:

ikvmc -target:library itext.jar
ikvmc -target:library -reference:itext.dll core-renderer.jar

(For newbies: If you didn't read any documentation and are just trying the commands, you also need to make sure the DLL files accompanying IKVMC is also present -- the easiest way to do this is to dump all the IKVMC files beside your iText JAR files)