Pdf Plugin

Authors : Aaron Eischeid, Glen Smith

Index

• Releases
• Usage
• Tag Documentation
• Issues

Releases

Glen did all the initial work to get the essential functionality and initial documentation

Version 0.2 - 14-Feb-2009

First release to Grails repositories!

Aaron did some reworking of the tagLibraries and controllers and also improved on the documentation. The most significant addition was the ability to use simple forms.

Version 0.3 - 20-Feb-2009

new features:

• graceful failing - if PDF generation fails for some reason you get the HTML view instead of an error page.
• pdfLink accepts class attribute for custom styling
• improved examples and docs

• update to new version of XHTMLrenderer and iText
• ability to use post method on pdfForms (images and external CSS must have absolute URLs)
• ability to generate pdf from either templates or to go through control action.
• ability to use on secured applications (must use method="post").
• project now hosted on GitHub, but rough copy in grails plugin repository
• most form elements now simply get ignored instead of throwing errors

• modify XHTMLrenderer to allow images to be rendered in PDF when relative URL's are used in GSP
• cleaning tag library code and fixing some minor bugs in tag rendering.

Usage

Also See the demo.gsp included with the plugin

designing your PDF
Design the GSP just like normal. Separate style sheets for media="print" and media="screen" are a good idea. You can use the CSS 3 @page to define page layout and margins.

@page {
    size: 8.5in 11in;  /* width height */
    margin: 0.25in;
}

The xhtmlRenderer user guide has some additional info about how to use CSS to control PDF layout.

XHTML form elements get ignored, but occasionally they will cause PDF generation to fail. It's best to leave them out if possible

Tag Documentation

g:pdfLink
attributes:

• url (required) - the url of the gsp to want to convert to PDF
• filename (optional) - what you want the filename of the resultant PDF to be - defualt = 'document.pdf'
• icon (optional) - will add and <img … /> tag
• class (optional) - set the class of element - default = 'pdf'

• url (required) - the url of the gsp to want to convert to PDF
• filename (optional) - what you want the filename of the resultant PDF to be
• name (optional) - becomes the name and id of HTML form - default = 'simplePdfForm'
• method (optional) - the method of the form - default = 'get'
• template (optional) - template you want to render as a pdf, method must = post (since 0.4)
• controller (optional) - requires action method='post' (since 0.4)
• action (optional) - controller action for rendering PDF (since 0.4)

Issues

• pdfLink still uses limited get method for sending params, and still doesn't allow for security
• in generating the pdf the controller does not have access to session or flash data. This poses serious problems if you are using security. no longer an issue in latest release if you use method='post'

auth(controller: "*", action: "*") {
            before = {
                // Exclude the "public" controller.
                // if (controllerName == "public") return true
                if(controllerName == 'pdf') return true
                if(actionName == '[yourAction]') return true
                // This just means that the user must be authenticated. He does 
                // not need any particular role or permission. 
                accessControl { true } 
            }
        }

Please log additional issues on GitHub project page or use the grails mailing list.