In the first article of this series, I discussed how to prevent users from printing directly from Flash’s default context menu. In the second article, I wrote about using the AlivePDF library to create PDFs from your application for printing or saving. Today I will be covering how to print application data from Flex.
The Flex framework comes with several classes to assist you in printing; however, they don’t tend to produce the greatest results. The PrintDataGrid class is probably your best option when it comes to printing data, but whenever I’ve worked with it in the past I’ve always ended up disappointed. Even after formatting, there are always issues; like rows getting cut off and pages breaks in weird places.
There have been talks about AlivePDF offering a Grid class to the library, which may be interesting, but it hasn’t been released and would probably only handle DataGrid data. So the best option I’ve found for printing data is to allow a server to generate a PDF, which can then be sent back to Flex and output however you want.
A great benefit of this option is the ability to easily format the print results. You can use simple HTML and CSS to customize the printout much easier than you could using ActionScript. You can also add custom styles, letterheads, and footers to fit your needs.
Here is an example, you can view the source here.
This will work with any server-side script that can generate PDF content. In this demo I am using a ColdFusion script which simply generates an HTML table and returns it in PDF format. You can view the ColdFusion code along with the rest of the source code here.
The data from the server is returned to Flex as a ByteArray. You can take that ByteArray and output it to the user in several different ways:
Using the Browser
Similar to the last article in this series, you can send the results to a server-side script to either display the PDF in the browser or prompt the user to open or save the document. This time, however, the AlivePDF library is no longer necessary since the PDF binary has already been created.
var header:URLRequestHeader = new URLRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/octet-stream");
var urlString:String = "http://kalengibbons.com/assets/pages/pdfCreator.cfm";
if(method == "inline")
else
var sendRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(urlString);
sendRequest.requestHeaders.push(header);
sendRequest.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
sendRequest.data = pdfBinary;
navigateToURL(sendRequest, "_blank");
}
Save locally from Flash
Thanks to new capabilities in Flash Player 10, you can also provide users the option to save the PDF directly from Flash. This eliminates the need for the second server-side script.
fileRef.save(pdfBinary, "yourPrintout.pdf");
}
If you plan to use the save functionality you’ll need to set the “Required Flash Player version” in your project preferences to 10.0.0 or higher or else Flex Builder will complain. You have to remember that only users with Flash Player 10 or above will be able to use this functionality, so some type of version validation is a necessity.
Another caveat is that the save method must be triggered by some type of user interaction, that’s why the sample application prompts for system access before saving. Although the user has clicked the “Print Data” button, that event is lost when the server call is made, so we need another interaction from the user.
