Generate dynamic HTML/PDF

Nocoder

Hi!

Is it possible in REI3 to create an application which can generate dynamic PDF (or HTML) based on database data?
I want to create a workforce application where you can generate dynamic ID-cards for printing based on the employees name and occupation. What would be the best way to go about it?

Best Regards
Nocoder

gabriel

Hello Nocoder - welcome to the Forum 🙂
Yes you can generate dynamic PDF / HTML based on database data. If you want to print things with a specific layout in mind, PDF output would probably be the best choice.

Generating PDFs is however not a simple drag&drop operation - you will need to deal with functions.

PDF generation is currently supported with frontend functions via HTML/CSS - meaning that the PDF would be generated by a client with prepared HTML content and styling done via CSS rules. What you could do:

You create necessary database stuctures (your data + a table that holds your HTML/CSS template with text placeholders for your data)
You create a frontend function that gets data via a backend call and parse the HTML template (to apply your data via placeholders).
You then call the function app.pdf_create() with the prepared HTML, CSS and general PDF options like page layout etc.

REI3 can do lot´s of things without any scripting - but generating rich documents / PDFs requires some effort. If you want to attempt it, I can provide an example app.

adrianf0

gabriel
Following this methodology, I managed to generate some simple PDFs.
I am wondering now, how one could include some logos (images) in the generated PDFs documents. Do you have any clean solution recommendations?

telenieko

Hi,

First, awesome REI3, just started meddling with it.

REI3 can do lot´s of things without any scripting - but generating rich documents / PDFs requires some effort. If you want to attempt it, I can provide an example app.

I got here trying to find an example in the provided apps / demo. It would be very useful if one of those had an example of this. Maybe in Knowledge to print an article (simple?), or a ticket detail PDF (not so simple?)

thx

gabriel

telenieko

Hello and welcome to the forum 🙂

I have a short example app, where a PDF is generated from HTML+CSS templates. If you open a request via our contact form, I´ll have your contact details and can send it over.

My colleague, the one responsible for the Knowledge app, just wrote to me. He likes the idea of a PDF export and would implement it for the next release of the app. This might not be very soon, so the example app would probably be more helpful to you right now.

lsw-fabian

Hi @telenieko,
I have updated the lsw_knowledge application today and added an button to create an pdf file. You also have several options to customize your pdf output via CSS and so on in the configuration section.

I hope this will help you.

adrianf0

lsw-fabian
Hi @lsw-fabian ,
Is this button available in lsw_knwoledge v47 application ? I wanted to get some coding inspiration, but I can't find it.
Thank you in advance for pointing me to it.

lsw-fabian

Hi @adrianf0,
PDF features are available at lsw_knowledge v52 and newer.

lsw-fabian

Hey adrianf0,

good to hear. You could add images directly, base64 encoded into an rich text field - or add them as HTML img container.

gabriel

One way is to reference image files, such as <img src="MY_URL" />. This file coule be uploaded to any accessible webserver or even R3 itself, though links to uploaded files in R3 do expire with the user token, so the link would not stay valid forever.

Another option, is to store your images as base64 encoded values. This is what we do with our PDFs:

A base64 image can just be placed inside an img tag in HTML, such as:
<img src="data:image/png;base64,IMG_BASE64" />

You can encode images to base64 yourself or use online services such as: https://www.base64-image.de/

dimitrios1988

I am trying to generate a pdf report, but the greek fonts are not displayed correctly. I changed the fonts to Verdana and Tahoma, but no luck

gabriel

dimitrios1988
Hello and welcome to the forum 🙂

The library we use for PDF generation does not handle all charsets by default. It requires specially prepared fonts and they need to be added to the library during execution. Right now, we have no option for this in the standard.

Because this library has some downsides (like not handling non-ascii charsets well) and it stopped being developed, we are looking at replacing it. Unfortunately, there are very few option available, limited by our tech stack and dependencies. I hope, we can find a good solution for the next feature release (R3.8) but I cannot guarentee it. In the meantime we have to use workarounds, like using only ascii characters. It is not great, in any event.

Btw. development of the PDF library stopped only a few months after we have integrated it - that was lucky timing indeed.