A5W to PDF

[Sparticuz]

I have some A5W pages that are very custom reports. Is there any way to send the html it creates as a PDF?

[lgrupido]

Re: A5W to PDF

The a5w page in this instance would work just like an HTML page for printing purposes.

If you can print to a PDF from your browser, you should be able to print your a5w page to a PDF. (May require Adobe Acrobat or similar software)

Alternatively, rewrite the page in a report and then run the report to get your PDF.

[Sparticuz]

Re: A5W to PDF

Yeah, the problem is that the html document is about 450-500 pages long. Firefox and Chrome seem to hang when I try to print them.

I have tried using the report writer and it isn't as flexible as I need for these reports, LOTS of SQL lookups and custom functions and calculations in them.

[kkfin]

Re: A5W to PDF

I have some A5W pages that are very custom reports. Is there any way to send the html it creates as a PDF?

If you want to convert web page (url) directly to pdf try CutyCapt. It is easy to use and fast.

edit: 450-500 pages is too much for this tool. So forget.

[Sparticuz]

Re: A5W to PDF

I think I'm looking for a way that Alpha can do it in xbasic, maybe I can hook into the report.saveas function somehow. Another avenue I'm exploring is this: http://www.fpdf.org/ , but my initial, quick install and test didn't work. I will look more into this, but more suggestions welcome.

[kkfin]

Re: A5W to PDF

I think I'm looking for a way that Alpha can do it in xbasic, maybe I can hook into the report.saveas function somehow. Another avenue I'm exploring is this: http://www.fpdf.org/ , but my initial, quick install and test didn't work. I will look more into this, but more suggestions welcome.

Just info: You use CutyCapt of course with xbasic.

[lgrupido]

Re: A5W to PDF

My guess is that Alpha isn't your problem, it's the size of the web page. Trying to convert 500 pages of html code into a PDF is probably not going to work no matter what you do.

Can't you break it down into smaller chunks?

[Sparticuz]

Re: A5W to PDF

My guess is that Alpha isn't your problem, it's the size of the web page.

Agreed, It is the web browser breaking down. It's probably hitting some kind of upper file size limit. I am also looking into breaking the file down into manageable segments, BUT I also want to be able to do this for single page documents.

[drgarytraub]

Re: A5W to PDF

Use your xbasic scripts that you already wrote to produce the report, but instead of writing the results to html, write those to a temp table, then use the report generator to create the report based on that temp table.

[aburningflame]

Re: A5W to PDF

+1 for drgarytraubs answer

Just have a
custom_report_html table

report_id
report_html

ASSUMING ALPHA ALLOWS FOR OUTPUT BUFFERING:

Start a bufffer, write your page content then dump your buffer into the database . Here is php: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...html-to-server

<?php
// Start the buffering //
ob_start();
?>
Your page content bla bla bla bla ...

<?php
echo '1';

// Get the content that is in the buffer and put it in your file //
file_put_contents('yourpage.html', ob_get_contents());
?>

Your code

<%a5 startbufferfunction(); 'whatever this is %>
page content goes here

<%a5 
dim report_html as C=getbuffercontents() 'whatever this function may be in alpha

'note - connection establish and sql execute not shown - only sql statement
dim args as SQL::Arguments
args.set("report_html",report_html)
dim sql as C="INSERT INTO report_table (html) VALUES (:report_html)"

dim new_report_id as N=conn.LastInsertedIdentity() 
response.redirect("serve_my_report.a5w?rid="+new_report_id) 'redirect to a page that will call the necessary xbasic to create the pdf from the a5 report writer
end
 %>

[Sparticuz]

Re: A5W to PDF

Yeah, thanks for prototyping it. After drgarytraub posted that, That was exactly what I was thinking. Shouldn't be too difficult. What I do for the output buffering is write everything to a dim html as c, then ?html at the end of the page. I also get the added benefit of having a table with all the reports backed up historically with a table.

[aburningflame]

Re: A5W to PDF

No Problem.
Do you know the current alpha equivalent to ob_start and ob_get_contents?

Can I see a simple example of how you buffer output? (For knowledge/curiosities sake)

Thanks,
Scott

[Sparticuz]

Re: A5W to PDF

'Set up the header
dim content as c = "<!DOCTYPE html>"+crlf()+"<html lang='en' class='mailer'>"+crlf()+"<head>"+crlf()+"<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' />"+crlf()
*concat(content,"<title>"+report_title+"</title>"+crlf())
*concat(content,"<link rel='stylesheet' href='css/table.css' />"+crlf()+"</head><body>"+crlf())
'finish setting up the page, then at the end
*concat(content,"</body></html>")
?content

[aburningflame]

Re: A5W to PDF

Ah Gotcha, Ive used that method before.

I was trying to see if there was something along the lines of inbuilt buffering which didnt require you to constantly be concating to a variable.

In Php you could do something like.... (xbasic code shown, with php principle)

<%a5 startbuffer() %>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
Test
<%a5 ?"more xbasic code goes here" %>
</body>
</html>

<%a5 'dim output as C=buffer_contents()
         'OR
         '?buffer_contents()
         'OR
         ' write buffer_contents() to a file/db
 %>

This allows you to write html between tags without having to concat every single line of html.
Concating every single line of html is time-costly, and then you have to escape ", and - just headaches.

:) If you ever find those buffer methods, let me know!

Thanks,
Scott

[aburningflame]

Re: A5W to PDF

http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...856#post654856

From Lenny:
*obstart()*
Output buffering is always used, so it is effectively like having ob_start() at the top of every PHP page. There is no function call needed and no way to change this behavior.

*ob_get_contents()*
Response.OutputStream contains the buffered output. This is 100% identical to ASP.Net's OutputStream property (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...putstream.aspx). Here is a simple A5W page to show how to read from it along with a couple of other properties:

Code:
---------

<%a5
? "This is the first line of output<br/>" + crlf()

?"Readable: <b>" + Response.OutputStream.CanRead + "</b><br/>" + crlf()
?"Length: <b>" + Response.OutputStream.Length + "</b><br/>" + crlf()

dim OutputBufferContents as b
OutputBufferContents = Response.OutputStream.ToArray()


? "The output so far is:"+OutputBufferContents 'I changed this line to make the example output a little more simple
%>

So for your application at the very bottom of your page I would do something like this:

<%a5
     if Response.OutputStream.CanRead then
               dim contents as B=Response.OutputStream.ToArray()
               'insert into mytable (html_field) VALUES (:html)
               'dim args as SQL::Arguments
               'args.set("html",contents) 'you might have to do convert_type(contents,"C") to convert to string, but maybe you can store the raw byte array
     else
               ?"CANNOT READ OUTPUT STREAM"
     end if
%>