What's the best way to create printable letters from an MVC application? I'm looking for sort of a mail merge thing from my app that prints a form letter with various values filled in.
In ASP.NET, I previously did this by creating an HTML document and displaying it as application/msword, but I did that with code-behind, which isn't an (easy) option in MVC, and I don't know if that's the best method or not.
Note that this is an internal application, so it can be assumed everyone has Word on their computer. With that said, it would be nice to bypass Word, but I could go either way. The simpler the better. Any ideas/methods welcome.
Since this is just HTML with the ContentType set to application/msword I can't see any reason why you would want to use code-behind.
A standard MVC view with a typical HTML template peppered with appropriate <%=...> where view data needs to be inserted would seem to be the sensible approach. Even where you might want to loop.
BTW, why isn't code-behind an easy option?
In your controller:
return Content(contentGoesHere, "application/msword");
Related
I am volunteering on a website-based project that is trying to make all pages fully operable JavaScript free before adding any JavaScript for enhancements, and I was asked to investigate whether or not a particular scenario could be handled purely through HTML/CSS.
What we have is a form that is populated to help us filter a list of tickets that are displayed on the screen after a page update through a GET action, which itself works fine, but the concern with the current implementation is that the URL cannot be made into a permanent link. The request, however, to keep the permanent link as minimal as possible, is to only send GET parameters for fields that are populated with something (so, suppressing GET parameters for fields that are blank) instead of having a different GET parameter for each form field on the page.
I have thought of several ways that could be done, most including JavaScript (example: create fields with ids but no names and a hidden field w/ name that uses JS to grab the data from the fields), but also one that would be a POST action with a redirect back to the GET with a human readable string that could be permanently used. The lead dev, however would prefer not to go through the POST/redirect method if at all possible.
That being said, I'm trying to make sure I cover all my bases and ask experts their thoughts on this before I strongly push for the POST/redirect solution: Is there a way using only HTML & CSS to directly suppress GET parameters of a form for fields that are blank without using a POST/redirect?
No, suppressing fields from being submitted in an HTML form with method of "GET" is not possible without using JavaScript, or instead submitting the form with a POST method and using a server side function to minimize the form.
What fields are submitted are defined by the HTML specification and HTML and CSS alone cannot modify this behavior and still have the browser be compliant with the standards.
No, you cannot programmatically suppress any default browser behavior without using some kind of client scripting language, like JavaScript.
As a side note, you say "JavaScript for enhancements", but JavaScript is not used for enhancements these days. And no one in the real world would except a decent front-end without the use of JavaScript. I would suggest you simply use JavaScript.
I do not think you can avoid Javascript here to pre process before submission to eliminate unchanged /empty form fields.
Posted this in another forum, thought of posting here as well.
I need to send a jsp/html page, that is generated as a report, as an email. How do I do it?
If it's a static html page, I can hard code it as a string variable and set it as one of the arguments in the setContent method as follow:
message.setContent(stringValue,"text/html"), but how do I do it for a page that is actually a report, meaning it's contents are dynamic. Hope somone can help. Thank you.
Use a templating engine, like Velocity, to dynamically replace variables. Depending on tools and frameworks you already use, there might even be some ready-made helper classes. I know Spring has emailing features with built-in Velocity support.
I have created a spring application with multiple language support, using spring localization/Internationalization and jstl. Now I am going to remove all the jsp and replace it with html. Can make use of spring localization/Internationalization and resource bundles in pure html without jstl? (I am sure there has to be a way.)
You can get rid of JSTL if that's what you are asking for. After all, Spring has its own <sp:message> tag.
However, if you want to get rid of JSP completely and only serve static HTML, I am afraid it can't be done correctly.
That is, you can possibly generate the whole page with JavaScript (i.e. jQuery), but how useful is that?
And you'll be forced to implement some means of Localization for JavaScript anyway. I mean you'll probably need to generate file with translations on-the-fly.
It's do-able, but it would be extremely easy to introduce for example concatenation defects (that won't allow for re-ordering the sentence, that is proper translations).
To summarize this: you probably can do that, but you probably should not.
It is possible..with minimum tweaks..
Dont remove jSP,JSTL etc..
Convert each submit request to ajax..A server doesnt care whether a request is a normal browser submit request or XMLHttpRequest(ajax)..server will use JSP,JSTL to prepare appropriate HTML..u need ajax to render that html string into DOM.
$.ajax(url:'/xyz',
success:function(htmlFromServer){
document.open();
document.write(htmlFromServer);
document.close();
});
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
I need to copy values from a form displayed in one HTML page (incoming.html) to another HTML page (outgoing.html) in a browser. What will be the best approach to this, I have tried using imacros but have not been able to figure it out. I believe there can be a javascript solution to the above. What can be the best approach, I need the feature in a prototype and hence efficiency does not matter.
The best option would be to use a server scripting language. You can pass values between two HTML pages in 2 ways.
First, storing them in cookies using Javascript. If cookies are not enabled, then it would be a problem.
Second, Passing Values through the URL like PHP, but this method is not very secure if your using information that you do not want the user to view.
For eg:
a href='something.htm?Something=Passing some variables'
You can fetch them in the next page using Javascript and display them.