Extracting JSON data to PDF file - json

Question

I am trying to extract the data that I receive from a REST client in a JSON format into a PDF file. I know that I need to format it in columns/sections so first I need to convert to a text format, but is there a way to do that in Ruby? If so, does anyone have an example?
Here is the format of the JSON data that I am getting from the REST API:
{"id"=>123456, "documentKey"=>"xyz", "globalId"=>"xyz", "itemType"=>1234,
"project"=>123, "createdDate"=>"2015-02-20T00:11:56.000+0000",
"modifiedDate"=>"2015-02-20T00:11:56.000+0000",
"lastActivityDate"=>"2016-03-02T16:23:52.000+0000",
"createdBy"=>1234, "modifiedBy"=>12342,
"fields"=>{"name"=>"Introduction",
"globalId"=>"Text",
"documentKey"=>"Text-2",
"description"=>"Some introduction"
}
}

Answer 1

Check out Prawn. It does not just 'do' this for you, you will still have to figure out how to properly transform the hierarchical json data into a flat 'text-like' data. You will have to make decisions like, do I want to display timestamps, show empty values, etc.
Here is a very crude example:
require 'prawn'
data = {"id"=>123456, "documentKey"=>"xyz", "globalId"=>"xyz", "itemType"=>1234, "project"=>123, "createdDate"=>"2015-02-20T00:11:56.000+0000", "modifiedDate"=>"2015-02-20T00:11:56.000+0000", "lastActivityDate"=>"2016-03-02T16:23:52.000+0000", "createdBy"=>1234, "modifiedBy"=>12342, "fields"=>{"name"=>"Introduction", "globalId"=>"Text", "documentKey"=>"Text-2", "description"=>" Some introduction"}}
Prawn::Document.generate('example.pdf') do
text "Project: #{data['project']}"
text "Item Type: #{data['itemType']}"
text "Description: #{data['fields']['description']}"
end
For anything more advanced I would check the prawn manual.
The other quick option is to create an HTML template and convert that to PDF, and there are multiple gems for this as well such as Wicked_PDF or PDFKit