Picking your brains

[Journeyman]

Hi All
I’m developing a membership admin project, it’s relatively straightforward, recording members contact data, recording members annual subscriptions etc. It’s my first nodejs project, but development has gone pretty smoothly.
There is a requirement to produce tailored documents (preferably pdf) on a monthly basis for subscription payment reminders and each new member gets a tailored welcome letter, they’ll mainly be attached to email. About 30% of the members don’t have email so there’s a requirement to print the letters and post manually.

I must admit I’ve been putting this development stage on the back burner, as my previous experience of non wappler projects, creating pdf’s has always been a bit fraught and lots of trial and error.
Before I launch into this phase of development, does anyone have any advice or previous experience of doing this?

I have become so confident of Wappler’s capabilities that I just assumed it would be easy, but reading other pdf topics on here, it doesn’t seems so simple.
Ideally so the users don’t get confused, I would rather control it from within the existing site and not go off to sites like pdf monkey etc.

Thanks in advance

Dave

[scott]

@George

We are already working on a pdf generator extension based on pdfmake.

It will be an app connect component to generate and download a pdf from a specific html from the page. All client side. So this should suit most of your needs.

Later on we will be working also on a server side pdf generator to be able to generate pdf fully server side.

…

[Notum]

There are two approaches to have a PDF as result:

1. Export your already rendered page to PDF. Explanation - user will browse some page, all needed data will be loaded and then after you’ll exporting/transforming your HTML code to PDF. Most likely (and I’m highly speculating right now) - Wappler will release this feature in today’s release
2. Generating PDF from Data gathered from Wappler. Explanation: you are gathering/transforming your data in backend with Wappler and than passing these data to custom module which will hold sort of template which will be filled with your data and then generate a PDF file that will be stored in your server. For this approach you need a custom module developed specifically for you.

Both approach has their own pros and cons, but in overall Option 1 is much easier to accomplish but lacks a lot of customization while Option 2 is completely opposite.

[Journeyman]

Thanks, I’ll keep an eye out for it

[Journeyman]

Option 2 is my preferred option, so I’ll prepare myself for a rough ride😀

[TMR]

Its due in the next update which is probably today.