B4J Code Snippet Generate pdf reports using html + template engine + json data in b4j

We had a client that insisted on using a specific font in reports - we initially tried PDFjet but it was not clear if the original library which dates back to 2014 needed work and anyway we did not feel like forking out $295 to try (open source ver. is limited).

So we came up with this free solution using https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ and https://github.com/janl/mustache.js/ , no need for a http server as it executes locally (command line)

Install instuctions :

1) Install wkhtmltopdf on your system https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html
2) Make a folder called reports and put in the files included in the report folder in the zip
3) Modify paths in program to suit (specifically path to wkhtmltopdf "c:\program files\wkhtmltopdf\bin\wkhtmltopdf.exe")

You will need to activate the jShell, Json and Javaobject libraries.

Json data is created in the program and exported to render.js , report.html is the report that you can modify to suit json data using mustache.js template engine rules.

Hope it's useful to someone, feel free to modify and make it neater/better.

 

[Quandalle]

Have you considered using Apache PDFBox? It allows you to specify fonts when generating a pdf.

 

[andrewmp]

Briefly , they seem to be transitioning from 2.0 to 3.0 and examples are lacking for the moment.

 

[Ishmael]

Please can you show me how to add page numbers

 

[andrewmp]

The easy way is to add --footer-center [page]/[topage] to the command line of wkhtmltopdf. The hard way is to use a html footer file using --footer-html command. You'll find many examples if you google wkhtmltopdf , here is an example https://stackoverflow.com/questions...ers-in-pdf-generated-by-html-with-wkhtmltopdf