Flying saucer, Thymeleaf and Spring

flying-saucer, pdf, spring, thymeleaf

Solution

I'm using Flyingsaucer-R8 with Thymeleaf 2.0.14 without problems (and I'm sure current version of Thymeleaf works as well).

I have separate `TemplateEngine` with classpath template resolver configured for this purpose. Using it to produce `XHTML` as `String`. Flyingsaucer creates PDF document from result then. Check example below.

Code below is example - NOT PRODUCTION ready code use it with NO WARRANTY. For sake of clarity there's no try-catch handling and no resources caching (creating PDF is quite expensive operation). Consider that.

Code

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.springframework.core.io.ClassPathResource;
import org.thymeleaf.TemplateEngine;
import org.thymeleaf.context.Context;
import org.thymeleaf.templateresolver.ClassLoaderTemplateResolver;
import org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.ITextFontResolver;
import org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.ITextRenderer;

import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.BaseFont;
import com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.util.ByteOutputStream;

public class FlyingSoucerTestService {

  public void test() throws DocumentException, IOException {
    ClassLoaderTemplateResolver templateResolver = new ClassLoaderTemplateResolver();
    templateResolver.setPrefix("META-INF/pdfTemplates/");
    templateResolver.setSuffix(".html");
    templateResolver.setTemplateMode("XHTML");
    templateResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");

    TemplateEngine templateEngine = new TemplateEngine();
    templateEngine.setTemplateResolver(templateResolver);

    Context ctx = new Context();
    ctx.setVariable("message", "I don't want to live on this planet anymore");
    String htmlContent = templateEngine.process("messageTpl", ctx);

    ByteOutputStream os = new ByteOutputStream();
    ITextRenderer renderer = new ITextRenderer();
    ITextFontResolver fontResolver = renderer.getFontResolver();

    ClassPathResource regular = new ClassPathResource("/META-INF/fonts/LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf");
    fontResolver.addFont(regular.getURL().toString(), BaseFont.IDENTITY_H, true);

    renderer.setDocumentFromString(htmlContent);
    renderer.layout();
    renderer.createPDF(os);

    byte[] pdfAsBytes = os.getBytes();
    os.close();

    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(new File("/tmp/message.pdf"));
    fos.write(pdfAsBytes);
    fos.close();
  }
}

Template

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "http://www.thymeleaf.org/dtd/xhtml1-strict-thymeleaf-spring3-4.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
        <style>
            div.border {
                border: solid;
                border-width: 1px 1px 0px 1px;  
                padding: 5px 20px 5px 20px;
            }
        </style>        
    </head>
<body style="font-family: Liberation Serif;">

<div class="border">
    <h1 th:text="${message}">message</h1>
</div>

</body>
</html>

Problem

I have a Spring application and need to build support for PDF generation. I'm thinking of using Flying-saucer together with Thymeleaf to render the PDF. However, I cannot find that much information about using Flying-saucer together with Thymeleaf. Have anyone else used those to technologies together?

Original source