rails 3 and PDFkit

2
votes

I'm trying to follow this tutorial.

When I'm adding .pdf to my url it does nothing. My controller has:

respond_to :html, :pdf.

My mime type has been declared.

I tried this too:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.pdf {
    html = render_to_string(:layout => false , :action => "www.google.fr")
    kit = PDFKit.new(html)
    send_data(kit.to_pdf, :filename => "candidats.pdf", :type => 'application/pdf')
    return # to avoid double render call
  }
end

but it does not work and I don't get errors. My browser keep waiting for localhost, but nothing happens.

So how should I try to use pdfkit ?

edit 2 :

According to my rails' logs, rails render successfully the HTML. I saw this in the .log, rails doesn't send it to webrick nor to my browser. And my browser keeps waiting, and waiting and nothing happen. I only have little pictures here.

edit 3 : My webrick server seem unable to respond to other request, once he starts getting a .pdf version of my url, any ideas ?

edit 4 :

I am using rails 3.1, wkhtmltopdf 0.9.5 (windows installer) and pdfkit 0.5.2

2
ruby-on-railswkhtmltopdf
sorry, can't help you with your problem, but thanks for introducing pdfkit to me! always thought prawn was as 'good' as it gets. – Marian Theisen
There's a rather huge mismatch between the code you posted and the one that's shown on the tutorial you linked to. Are you sure you're following the tutorial? – Benoit Garret

2 Answers

6
votes

I found a better way to access my .pdf urls even in developpement mode.

# Enable threaded mode
config.threadsafe!

# Code is not reloaded between requests
#config.cache_classes = true

Config.cache_classes is a comment, cause i had some problems when it wasn't. This way pdfkit works wonder even with rails 3.1. But, you don't reload code between requests.

That's not really a problem, cause you first work on your html, and you switch configuration, in order to check the pdf result. This way you don't have to bother about your production database.

3
votes

Thanks to another stack overflow answer I got part of solution.

This works:

html = '<html><body>Toto de combats</body></html>'
@pdf = PDFKit.new(html)

send_data @pdf.to_pdf, :filename => "whatever.pdf",
                  :type => "application/pdf",
                  :disposition  => "attachement"

You can replace attachement by inline, so the pdf is displayed in your browser.

In the stack overflow answer I spoke about (I don't remember the link), the .to_pdf was missing, but is mandatory. Otherwise PDF reader doesn't recognize it.

I'm trying to get this work with a .pdf url.

Edit 3:

My problem with .pdf urls is solved. known issue with rails 3.1, but google was unable to find them.

explanation : explanation

Workaround (hadn't tryied yet). workaround