PDFS from GAE using web2py & pdfcrowd

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Recently we used pdfcrowd to print pdfs from several of our applications running on the Google App Engine.

Integration is very straight forward – we use the web2py python framework to run on top of GAE – so these steps reflect that. Also in our example we want our python function to return the content as a pdf file.

  1. Register at pdfcrowd
  2. Download their python client library
  3. Copy the source of the client library to the module directory of your web2py application directory
  4. Use the code snippet example below to initialize and call the pdfcrowd library
def print_observation_formpdfcrowd():

   out = StringIO.StringIO()

   pdfcrowd = local_import('pdfcrowd')

   client = pdfcrowd.Client("username", "apikey")

   # our html to convert
   html='<head></head><body>My HTML Layout</body>'

   client.convertHtml(html, out)

   # prepare PDF to download:
   response.headers['Content-Type']='application/pdf'

   pdf_file_name = 'evaluation.pdf'

   response.headers['content-disposition']='attachment;
      filename='+pdf_file_name

   return out.getvalue()

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