I'm currently using PRAWN with latest release of rails and I can't figure out how to download multiple files with a single HTTP request. in my controller I have the following code:
Fill PDF with my stuffs...
PDF.render_file "foo.pdf"
send_file("foo.pdf")
And it download correctly the file but - if after that - I put another istance of the same code...it will execute only the last one, foo2
PDF.render_file "foo.pdf"
send_file("foo.pdf")
PDF.render_file "foo.pdf"
send_file("foo2.pdf")
Moreover, If at end...I wish to render another view, I can't do it.
Question is:
How can I download 2 different files in a single action inside controller and, finally, render a view?
You cant unless you zip them and then send back the zip file
You could use pdftk to combine the pdf's on the server, and send ONE pdf.
Other than that, to only way to get multiple file downloads is to have the broswer send multiple AJAX requests to the server, and each one end with send_file.
That would take some JavaScript, and you'd end up with multiple file download dialogs popping up on your screen.
Related
I'm planning to build a Rails app where user can view content of zip-file in their browser without downloading the actual content. Is this possible using RubyonRails? Please guide me a way forward.
Thanks,
Sure you can! Take at look at the rubyzip gem. With it, you could for example get the names of all files contained in the zip as follows
zip_filenames = Zip::File.open('foo.zip') do |zip_file|
zip_file.map { |entry| entry.name }
end
Then use this array to somehow display it in your application. If you'd actually want to open a video/text file contained in the archive, you'll have to extract it on the server to some temporary location, then open it through some other means.
I have a ajax download functionality in my MVC webapp.
User can select a criteria and click on export button. Internally it will fetch data and return an Excel file. up to this functionality is working fine.
But the issue occurs, While one download process is running and now user changes the filter criteria and again click on export button. Now two download processes are running. Whichever process completes first will return file to download. Now the user can see Open, save, cancel option to download first file. As this stage when second download request is also completed and returns file to download. When I opens one file the another file download option is also lost.
Initially I thought it might because both the files are having same name. So I made changes to set unique file name for every request. But It still gives only single file to download.
Can anyone help me on this?
edited :
On other pages where I have two different types of files to download, the above functionality works successfully.
In none ajax requests, page can only be waiting for one response.
In order to solve that problem and wait for multiple responses you should use target attribute with value "new" as the following code depicts:
Your download Text
The above code makes each response to be downloaded in a new tab.
I need to generate a pdf file and upload it to the AWS upon some action from my controller. I've never done this before with rails, neither created a pdf and then upload it to the aws.
So here is what I'm thinking, how to proceed.
When a action in my controller occurs and it invokes a method a, it will invoke the Job B which is a delayed job who will call the controller method c which has the respond_to and format pdf. And the job will save the .pdf file to the AWS.
The pdf that I'm using needs to be stored on the aws so it can be emailed to a user later. Not sure if this is relevant, just wanted to give more details.
I'm using prawn gem to generate the pdf
Is there a better way to do this, has anyone done something like this before?
http://rubygems.org/gems/wicked_pdf
"Wicked PDF uses the shell utility wkhtmltopdf to serve a PDF file to a user from HTML. In other words, rather than dealing with a PDF generation DSL of some sort, you simply write an HTML view as you would normally, and let Wicked take care of the hard stuff."
I've done something similar using pdfkit. Essentially you just define your PDF layout in HTML/CSS, and when a user adds the .pdf suffic to a path, it attempts to generate the PDF. It's nice because you don't have to actually store generated PDF files, but they'll always be available if someone needs them.
I need to individualize documents within an iOS-App. I could provide the origin-documents as DOCX, PDF, PPT etc. The output-format has to be PDF.
My minimun requirement is to fill some text-fields. Nice to have would be to replace an image, too.
I´m quite used to generate PDFs programmatically using UIGraphicsBeginPDFContextToFile etc. But in my current case I don´t want to create the whole document programmatically, I just want to replace some content.
Any hints / tipps?
Thank you in advance.
DOCX is a zip - format file so you can process the contents programmatically and the reconstruct the zip file. PPT is a binary format though newer versions of PowerPoint might also construct zip-oriented versions that you can programmatically process. You mentioned though that you need don't want to programmatically process these documents - which I would probably also do only as a last resort.
For your DOCX origin/source documents (or doc,odt,rtf but not ppt/pdf) you could use Docmosis cloud services if your app can have the external dependency. You would upload your DOCX origin documents with placeholders for text-fields or images as a one-off/occasional task. Your iOS app then calls Docmosis sending instructions and data to create the output PDF and either stream it back to the app or email/store it or both.
The upside is it takes all the load and coding away from the iOS application (there is an SDK). The downside is it is an external depdendency. Please note I work for the company the created Docmosis.
Hope that helps.
Why not just load a page in a webView modal that points to a URL of a page you create? The main parts of the page would be static, and then the fields you need to customize would be populated via Javascript or PHP.
For example, we have a contact form in our app that gives you an option to view the details of your completed form after you submit. When the user clicks on the button to view the Contact Confirmation, it loads example.com/confirmation.php in a modal view within the iOS App.
On the confirmation.php page (on the web), I use PHP to pull in $_GET variables from the URL parameters which then populates the page with my static content, and their customized information that they entered into the form.
As it takes some time to prepare the content of the data to be downloaded, I want to show a message "Preparing file to download" when the user submits the request
Then when the file is ready, I use send_file to send the data
Once it's done, I need to clear the message
Thanks a lot
Here is what I would do.
1. Create a prepare_file action
First, I would create an action whose job would just be to create the file and rather than rendering HTML, it would render a JSON object with the name of the file that was created.
2. Use AJAX to call the prepare_file action
On the client, when the user clicks to download the file, you display the message, "Preparing download..." and just do an AJAX request to that action. The response you'll get back via AJAX is the name of the file created.
3. Redirect to the file download
Finally, you can hide the preparing download message and redirect the browser to the file download via JavaScript with the name of the file that was created. You would use send_file in this action.
I know that, in the question, you also wanted to be able to display to the user a message when the file is downloading and another message when it is finished. However, this isn't possible unless you write your own client-side download manager. The browser handles file downloads entirely and the user will see in the browser that the file is downloading and what the progress is. So, I understand where you're coming from, but you shouldn't feel like the user isn't being informed of what's happening.
At least with this solution, you're displaying a message to them when the file is being prepared and then once that message disappears, they'll get the download file dialog from the browser.
If you need help with actual code samples of how to do this, let me know.