KBL4all - The free KBL solution for everyone!

The KBL4all tool generates a conveniently navigable HTML report or PDF report from a given KBL file. This presents the user with all the contents of the KBL in an attractive and easily searchable structure.

Due to its reporting approach, KBL4all is not comparable to interactive KBL viewers, which additionally offer various search and filter options.

The main focus in the development of the tool was and is the quality assurance of the current VDA standard KBL. KBL4all is primarily intended to display all contents of a KBL in such a way that the standard-compliant application can be verified as well as possible for the author or recipient of the KBL.

The following requirements for the tool are derived from this objective:

• All contents of the KBL are displayed.
• The latest KBL version is fully supported in a timely manner.
• Schema violations are recognised and displayed.
• Implicit constraints that are not anchored in the schema definition are also checked and displayed.
• The architecture of KBL4all also allows the integration of additional checking routines that, if necessary, only check rules agreed bilaterally between the exchange partners (e.g. value ranges). Thus, the tool can play an important role in the communication between development partners.

4Soft was and still is significantly involved in the official KBL specification.

Download

KBL4all is undoubtedly the “dinosaur” among the KBL tools. According to our version management, the tool was developed at the end of 2006 and has not really been maintained since. It is all the more astonishing that it still does its job without any problems and in some respects is still at least equal to commercial solutions. For the launch of the new 4Soft website, we have fixed a few minor bugs and translated and tested the tool with Java8, so that we can now offer this classic for free download again:

kbl4all-dist.zip: Please download and unpack this file.

KBL4all is a Java application that in principle runs on all platforms that support Java. KBL4all requires a JRE version 1.8 or higher and a computer with at least 1 GB of main memory.

Application

You start the application either via the scripts supplied (kbl4all.cmd or kbl4all.sh) or directly in a console via

java -Xms256m -Xmx1024m -jar kbl4all-1.1.0.jar

After starting KBL4all, you will be asked to enter the path to the KBL file for which you want to create a report. You can use the corresponding file selection dialogue to do this.

Once you have selected the KBL file, you can start the report generation by pressing the “Generate” button. KBL4all now creates a new directory with the name of the KBL file in the directory of the KBL file and generates the files of the report there.

After the report has been successfully created, you will find the file index.html there, which you can now view in any XHTML- and CSS-capable browser. Normally, this file is opened automatically after the report has been created. Please note that Java script must be activated to display the HTML content.

KBL4all also has a command line interface for batch processing of multiple KBL files. The call syntax is displayed by entering KBL4all -help.

Please note that generating a PDF report requires a lot of main memory. In case of an abort due to an OutOfMemoryError, you can try to further increase the maximum allocated main memory.