PDF Output of Tapestry Pages

[Patrick Casey <pc...@hosteddataservices.com>]

 

            I've got a rather bizarre requirement at the moment (at least in
my mind) where people want to be able to get a report of what their screen
looked like. In other words if you fill in an order form, the administrator
doesn't want just any old report describing your order, he wants a report
that looks *just like* the screen you filled in. I suppose, in theory, I
could write the world's most complicated report to try to replicate what the
order form looked like, but then I have to keep two parallel things in
synch; never a good idea.

 

            What I was hoping to do was simply use the existing tapestry
engine, which already knows how to render an order form, and then capture
the resulting character stream in memory instead of sending it out to a
client. Then I want to take that HTML document and translate it into a PDF.

 

            So my question is, can anyone recommend an open source library
that takes HTML input and produces PDF output? I poked around a bit on
google, but most of what I found want to take a meta-format and then produce
either PDF or HTML, whereas I already have the HTML and want to go directly
to PDF.

 

            Any suggestions?

 

            --- Pat

Re: PDF Output of Tapestry Pages

[Dmitry Gusev <dm...@gmail.com>]

File -> Print to PDF on a client side?

Who knows how to display HTML? Each browser make this on it's manner, for
instance - rounded buttons in IE & Konqueror and strict rectangle in
Firefox. Different filters in IE and many many other things. What I want to
say is HTML is just a markup language and designers often made several views
for a page oriented to different browsers.

If you need a copy of an order form - then just save it as HTML or print it
out to PDF via File | Print... as I already said above...


There is another way. Let's say you've mane an order an get it as HTML in
your browser but this HTML is just a HTML view of some report engine, like
Jasperreports. Then you can provide a link to completely identical PDF
version of that page.

I already have a component like this for tapestry 4. All you need it to
create jasper report design an provide a datasource for that design. The
component will made all the job for you - provide an HTML representation of
a report with a navigation toolbar and a link to it's PDF version. You can
found it at www.keyintegrity.com. There is no public SVN repository yet but
you can download sources as tar.gz. Check out
org.keyintegrity.servicehub.csulengine.components.JasperReport.



2006/1/20, Patrick Casey <pc...@hosteddataservices.com>:
>
>
>
>             I've got a rather bizarre requirement at the moment (at least
> in
> my mind) where people want to be able to get a report of what their screen
> looked like. In other words if you fill in an order form, the
> administrator
> doesn't want just any old report describing your order, he wants a report
> that looks *just like* the screen you filled in. I suppose, in theory, I
> could write the world's most complicated report to try to replicate what
> the
> order form looked like, but then I have to keep two parallel things in
> synch; never a good idea.
>
>
>
>             What I was hoping to do was simply use the existing tapestry
> engine, which already knows how to render an order form, and then capture
> the resulting character stream in memory instead of sending it out to a
> client. Then I want to take that HTML document and translate it into a
> PDF.
>
>
>
>             So my question is, can anyone recommend an open source library
> that takes HTML input and produces PDF output? I poked around a bit on
> google, but most of what I found want to take a meta-format and then
> produce
> either PDF or HTML, whereas I already have the HTML and want to go
> directly
> to PDF.
>
>
>
>             Any suggestions?
>
>
>
>             --- Pat
>
>
>