How to save rails generated pages to a file on the server

rubyonrails-talk
1

My show view of a data form is finished and now I want to give a possibility to download this view as a pdf file.

I would like to use HTMLDOC to convert the html text to pdf. My idea: save the html text to a temporary folder and run HTMLDOC.

But how can I save the html text to a file?

2

render_to_string

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Base.html#M000659

That puts it into a local variable anyway... if you can then pass that to htmldoc you're on your way. Not sure how this might affect any paths to CSS/images for HTMLDOC though.

3

Philip Hallstrom wrote:

render_to_string

ActionController::Base

That puts it into a local variable anyway... if you can then pass that to htmldoc you're on your way. Not sure how this might affect any paths to CSS/images for HTMLDOC though.

Thanks. CSS is "no problem" with HTMLDOC - it doesn't support it :wink:

Maybe, I need to find some alternative for HTMLDOC. My problem is, that I have a table with variable number of columns.

4

render_to_string

ActionController::Base

That puts it into a local variable anyway... if you can then pass that to htmldoc you're on your way. Not sure how this might affect any paths to CSS/images for HTMLDOC though.

Thanks. CSS is "no problem" with HTMLDOC - it doesn't support it :wink:

Maybe, I need to find some alternative for HTMLDOC. My problem is, that I have a table with variable number of columns.

Prawn. #153 PDFs with Prawn - RailsCasts

5

You might want to check out:

http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

wkhtmltopdf is free. prince will cost you. prince has better css print-related implementation coverage at this time, but wkhtmltopdf can be a very good alternative depending on the needs of your project.

Jeff

6

Prawn seems to need a fixed number of columns in tables, so I'll take a look on wkhtmltopdf.

7

Since I started using tools (like prince/wkhtmltopdf) to generate pdfs from html/css for web app projects that need to gen pdfs, I've never gone back to using low-level pdf-gen'ing libs/tools (like prawn). Just requires so much less work.

By the way, you may also want to look into using PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit in combination with wkhtmltopdf(/prince) in case you need to do any post-processing of your gen'd pdfs (adding additional watermarks, splitting out pdf pages, combining pdfs, ....).

Jeff