Rails generating PDF File from current Page

Question

What I want to do is, generate a PDF file from my current page. (HTML)

I call a controller function which generates my page, it fetches data from database and so on.

Now I want a button which saves the current rendered page as a PDF file on the visitors machine. How can I do that?

If I use your code like this:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html { render :template => "user/settings" }
  format.pdf {
    kit = PDFKit.new('http://google.com')
    kit.stylesheets << "#{Rails.root}/public/stylesheets/pdf.css"
    send_data(kit.to_pdf, :filename=>"sdasd.pdf",
              :type => 'application/pdf', :disposition => 'inline')
  }

end

and reload the page ... nothing gonna be downloaded as a pdf ... why?

Check out this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18191893/generate-pdf-from-html-in-div-using-javascript — Yahor Zhylinski, Oct 23 '15 at 10:08
it only downloads as pdf when you use .pdf as your page extension. /path/to/page /path/to/page.pdf — sadaf2605, Oct 26 '15 at 12:43

sadaf2605 · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-26T12:56:53.793

You can create a similar template for pdf of your current page. Then you can use pdfkit gem.

Add this gems to your gemfile:

gem "pdfkit"
gem "wkhtmltopdf-binary"

Add something like this at your controller:

  def show
    @user= User.find(params[:id])
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render :template => "users/show" }
      format.pdf {
        html = render_to_string(:layout => false , :action => "show.pdf.erb") # your view erb files goes to :action 

        kit = PDFKit.new(html)
        kit.stylesheets << "#{Rails.root}/public/stylesheets/pdf.css"
        send_data(kit.to_pdf, :filename=>"#{@user.id}.pdf",
          :type => 'application/pdf', :disposition => 'inline')
    }

    end

  end

Now you can download pdf by adding .pdf to your controller route. eg: controller/routes/path/1.pdf

Or if you don't like it you can do

kit = PDFKit.new('http://google.com')

Is there a possibility to generate the pdf from the current rendered page? Example. I have rendered a page and can see it in the browser. Full HTML-Code is generated. So I want to have a button to genereate a pdf from this HTML code. — Felix, Oct 25 '15 at 16:52
@Felix just change `:action => "show.html.erb" ` which is your current page view file. — sadaf2605, Oct 26 '15 at 12:53

Rails generating PDF File from current Page

1 Answers1