I know there is a list of similar questions but all handle pages without user interaction (static even though some js may be there).
Let's say we've a page the user can interact (e.g. svg than changes, or html tables with drilldown - content changes). Those interactions will change the page. Same happens in stackoverflow when entering the question...
The idea is adding a button, "convert to pdf" taking the state of the html and sending to the user back a pdf version (we've a Java server).
Using the print of the browser is not the answer I'm looking for :-).
Is this a stick in the moon ?
You would have to store the parameters that generate the HTML view (i.e. what the user clicks on, what selections they make, etc). If you can have a list of parameters that generate the HTML view, you can have a method which accepts the list of parameters (JSON post?), generates the HTML view and passes it to your PDF generating routine. I'm not too familiar with Java libraries for this purpose, but PHP has TCPDF can take html output to basically generate a PDF for you. Certainly, there are Java libraries which will allow you to do the same thing, or you can use the parameters to get a list of rows/arrays which can be iterated over and output using the PDF library of your choice.
Both iTextPDF and Aspose.PDF would allow you to do that (I've seen them used in two different projects), but there is no magic and you will have to do some work.
The steps are roughly:
Get (as a string) the part of the document which you want to print with jQuery or innerHTML
Call a service on the server side to convert this to PDF
[Serverside] Use a whitlist - based tool to clean up the hmtl (unless you want to be hacked). JSoup is great for that.
[Serverside] Use IText or Aspose API to create the PDF from the HTML (this is not trivial, you will have to read the doc)
Download the document
I'd also recommend DocRaptor, an HTML to PDF API built by my company, Expected Behavior.
DocRaptor uses Prince XML to generate PDFs, and thus produces higher quality results than similar products.
Adding PDF generation to your own web application using our service is as simple as making an HTTP POST request to our server.
Here's a link to DocRaptor's home page:
DocRaptor
And a link to our API documentation:
DocRaptor API documentation
Related
I'm creating a VCL Application with Delpi 10.3 and want to support some web functionality by having the user enter the ISBN of a book into a TEdit component and from there passing/sending this value to a search field on this website: https://isbnsearch.org after which the website looks up the ISBN and displays the Author of the book. I want to somehow access the information (i.e Author) presented by the search result and again use it in my application.
This is my GUI, for a better idea of what I want to accomplish:
What code can I use for this? Any other feasible suggestions or approaches are acceptable.
When performing a search on that website, it simply loads a page with a specific URL query string...
https://isbnsearch.org/search?s=suess
The above example is when I search for "suess", so you can easily concatenate a search URL.
You can use any HTTP component, such as TIdHTTP, to load this search page, then use an HTML parser to scrape the page and read what you need. Much, much easier than trying to read through the TWebBrowser.
In the end, you won't actually display the HTML (I mean you can if you want to), but the idea is to read the data and display it in your own format.
On that specific page, start by locating the ul element with id searchresults. Then, each li element contains individual results. Unfortunately, this website uses pagination, and only shows 10 results per page. To do this, call this page again with another parameter &p=2 for the 2nd page, &p=3 for the 3rd page, and so on.
On the other hand, that is the worst way to acquire such information. What you should be doing is using a proper API which gives you machine-friendly data. The service you are referencing doesn't appear to have an option, but here's an example of one which does:
https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books - this also appears to provide you MUCH more information than the one you're using.
I am currently trying to do this: once the webpage loads, find out if the URL is of a certain pattern (say www.wikipedia.com/*), then, if so, parse the HTML content of that webpage like one can do with BeautifulSoup, and check if the webpage has a div with class foo and id boo. Any idea where can I writ this code, that is, where can I get access to URL, where do I need to listen to to know that the webpage has finished loading following which I can look for the URL and HTML content, and where and how I can parse the HTML?
I tried going through the code in src/chrome/browser/tab_contents, I could not find any reasonable place where I can do all this.
Take a look at the following conceptual application layers which represent how Chromium displays web pages:
Image Source: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1gdSTfvLxbJDbX8oiWo5LTwAmXmdMQvjoUhYEhfhj0-k/edit
The different layers are described as:
WebKit: Rendering engine shared between Safari, Chromium, and all other WebKit-based browsers. The Port is a part of WebKit that integrates with platform dependent system services such as resource loading and graphics.
Glue: Converts WebKit types to Chromium types. This is our "WebKit embedding layer." It is the basis of two browsers, Chromium, and test_shell (which allows us to test WebKit).
Renderer / Render host: This is Chromium's "multi-process embedding layer." It proxies notifications and commands across the process boundary.
WebContents: A reusable component that is the main class of the Content module. It's easily embeddable to allow multiprocess rendering of HTML into a view. See the content module pages for more information.
Browser: Represents the browser window, it contains multiple WebContentses.
Tab Helpers: Individual objects that can be attached to a WebContents (via the WebContentsUserData mixin). The Browser attaches an assortment of them to the WebContentses that it holds (one for favicons, one for infobars, etc).
Since your goal is to access and interpret the HTML content of a web page by element and/or class, you can look to the rendering process which uses Blink:
The renderers use the Blink open-source layout engine for interpreting and laying out HTML.
Blink has a WebDocument class which allows you to access the HTML content and other properties of a web page:
WebDocument document = GetMainFrame()->GetDocument();
WebElement element = document.GetElementById(WebString::FromUTF8("example"));
// document.Url();
Cleanest would be via the chrome remote debugging protocol
Use the DOM methods to get the root DOM and walk, search, or query the dom
This would make testing simpler as well: you can implement the logic in your favourite scripting language using an existing client library (there are many) and once that works implement it in C++.
If this for some reason has to be inprocess within Chromium, as a next step start a thread that connects to this and performs the operations.
You need to use a server side library to parse the contents of a requested HTML page. In Java for example there is a library "jsoup" there might be another alternatives for other server side languages. The main problem you could find is a "forbiden access", due to security restrictions, but as you are not trying to access REST services or similar things but only parse pure HTML to found string patterns, it must be easily done with "jsoup". There was a project where similar things were programmed for accessing web sites pages & parse the response html string.
Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://jsoup.org").get();
Element link = doc.select("a").first();
String relHref = link.attr("href"); // == "/"
String absHref = link.attr("abs:href"); // "http://jsoup.org/"
See: https://jsoup.org/
I created a pdf template with open office draw. it has textboxes and I can set values with acrofield. But I can't import a html content to template.
I can convert html contents to pdf file; but for template, how can I do it?
My problem is with template; also my html content have to map on page, for example center of page.
Thanks
I am not quite sure if I understand your question, but it seems like you need some kind of template where you will enter your content.
My thinking goes to OpenXML as the best fit. But since it is rather complex you can save some time by using third party tools.
From my experience, Docentric gives you good value for the money. You can prepare a template in Word and then merge it with data from any source that can fit into .NET object. Your document can be converted to pdf or xps if required.
Templates are generated in MS Word (2007 or newer) using special Docentric Add-in for template generation. All MS Word formatting can be applied here. Placeholders for data are set where the data will appear at runtime.
The process is straight forward so even end users can design reports. Developers then focus on bringing data in from various sources (database, XML). Chech the product documentation for ideas how to use it.
I just want to automate a web application, where that application parses the HTML page and pulls all the HTML Tags inner text based on some condition like if we have a tag called Span Example has given whose class="spanclass_1"
This is span tag...
which has particular class id. so that app parses and pulls that span into it.
And here the main pain area is, I should not use the developer code to automate that same parsing the HTML.
I want to automate that parsing done correctly, simply by using the parsed data which is shown in UI.
Any help, would be great.
Appreciating your time reading this.
(Note span tag is not shown)
Thanks buddies.
not enough details.
is this html page just a file in local filesystem on it is internet webpage?
do u have access to pages? can u modify it ? if answer yes, that just add javascript to page which will extract data and post to server.
if answer not, than it depends on language u use to programm.
Find good framework to parse html. load page parse it and extract data. Several situation can be there.
Worse scenario - page generated on client side using js.
Best scenario - page is in xhtml mode( u are lucky. any xml parser will help to build dom and extract data)
So so - page is simple html format (try several html parser to find most suitable for u)
I have looked at the readability api which is useful to display data in a clean format on a html webpage. I am passing a Url to http://www.readability.com/read?url= to display the data. I am initially directed to a page where I can choose to view the info using readability is there any way I can directly view the content in a neat fashion without going through the actual re-direct?
take a look at Readability's API: http://www.readability.com/developers/api
Before you implement your code, you have to create an API Key on their website.