From: Geoffrey T. <gta...@na...> - 2002-06-04 20:35:06
|
Have you looked at http://webware.colorstudy.net/twiki/bin/view/Webware/PdfCreationWithReportLa b001 ? - Geoff > -----Original Message----- > From: Tim Roberts [mailto:ti...@pr...] > Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2002 4:15 PM > To: web...@li... > Subject: [Webware-discuss] Reportlab? > > > This message is only marginally related to webware, but you > folks have > probably run up against this. > > I have a webware site in which I need to produce reasonably > good looking > printed output. We all know that the current generation of > browsers has an > extremely high degree of suckage in its ability to render > tabular-formatted > printed output. So, I decided to use ReportLab to produce PDF files. > > Overall, I am delighted with the results. I get a huge > amount of control and > flexibility, and it looks exactly right on everyone's > computer. However, I'm > not entirely happy with the mechanism. > > Here's the way I would LIKE it to work. > 1. User fills out form, clicks submit. > 2. Form fires Webware servlet. > 3. Servlet returns magic header that tells the browser "whoops, here > comes PDF data". > 4. Browser gives familiar "run from here or save to disk" > dialog, or else > fires Acrobat Reader inside browser. > > I can't seem to make this happen automagically. What I do > now is have the > Webware servlet render to a PDF file on the server, then send > the browser a > redirect to that file. That way, the browser sees the PDF > extension on the > URL and does the right thing. > > I don't like this, for several reasons: if I use a single > file name, I limit > my number of concurrent users to 1 (that's not a problem > today, but it will > be). If I use generated file names, I have to manage them > somehow. I don't > really need to retain the PDF files at all. > > So, is there a way that a Webware servlet can generate > something that passes > through Apache and looks to the browser as if it were a PDF > binary, without > using this redirect trick? I tried various permutations of > "Content-Type", > including application/pdf, but I didn't come up with the right recipe. > > (One alternative is for me to do an immediate redirect to a > Python script > that happens to be named "xxxx.pdf"; this also works, but > seems sort of > illegitimate.) > > -- > - Tim Roberts, ti...@pr... > Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. > > > > _______________________________________________________________ > > Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference > August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm > > _______________________________________________ > Webware-discuss mailing list > Web...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss > |
From: Tim R. <ti...@pr...> - 2002-06-04 21:23:20
|
On Tue, 04 Jun 2002 13:15:12 -0700, Tim Roberts wrote: > >I have a webware site in which I need to produce reasonably good looking >printed output. We all know that the current generation of browsers has an >extremely high degree of suckage in its ability to render tabular-formatted >printed output. So, I decided to use ReportLab to produce PDF files. >... >So, is there a way that a Webware servlet can generate something that passes >through Apache and looks to the browser as if it were a PDF binary, without >using this redirect trick? I tried various permutations of "Content-Type", >including application/pdf, but I didn't come up with the right recipe. Thank you to the four people who replied almost immediately after my question. I thought I had previously tried what the replies suggested: Content-type: application/pdf Content-disposition: attachment; filename=labels.pdf But I must have had something wrong in the incantation. This does exactly what I expected. Actually, there is one weird side effect: I get TWO "Open from this location / Save to disk" dialogs, but it only opens Acrobat once. I can experiment with that. Thanks very much! -- - Tim Roberts, ti...@pr... Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. |