How to generate PDF from .cfm page in Mac - coldfusion

I am using <cfdocument> tag of coldfusion 7. Using CFEclipse and working on MacOS.
I have written the following code:
<cfdocument format="pdf">
SitePoint.com - Introduction to ColdFusion 7
PDF Generation
This is an example of PDF generation using ColdFusion 7.
</cfdocument>
But instead of asking me to save this file in .pdf format, its trying to open it in .cfm format.
How can I save it in .pdf format? Thanks!

Unless you tell it otherwise, the webserver returns the results of a CFM call as text. You need to use CFContent with CFHeader to alert the browser that the results it will be recieving are of a different type. Something like:
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="inline; filename=document.pdf">
<cfcontent type="application/x-pdf">
<cfdocument>...</cfdocument>
I may have the MIME type wrong there. I'm doing this from memory. Check the docs for more help.

If you are on CF8 or higher then use the saveAsName attribute:
<cfdocument saveAsName=""
Either that or the method suggested by Ben above should work

You might also need to import the style sheet as well. So you can get the desired formatting. It needs to be imported after cfdocument.
<cfdocument
format="pdf"
filename = "canwriteurfile.pdf"
overwrite = "yes"
marginBottom = ".2"
marginLeft = ".4"
marginRight = ".4"
marginTop = ".2">
<style type="text/css">#import "pdf.css";</style>
BLAHHH BLAHHH PDF FORMATTING STUFF
</cfdocument>

Try:
<cfdocument format="PDF" name="myPDF">
<html>
<body>
SitePoint.com - Introduction to ColdFusion 7
PDF Generation
This is an example of PDF generation using ColdFusion 7.
</body>
</html>
</cfdocument>
<cfpdf action = "write" destination = "pdf_path" source = "myPDF" overwrite = "yes"/>
<cflocation url="pdf_path"/>
Whis this you save the PDF on disk

Related

Using cfimage to display a file that doesn't have an extension

curious one this.
I'm working on a process that generates PDF files, combining data from various sources. The last piece of this process I need to complete is merging in image files.
This is actually fairly straightforward but the problem I have is the image files aren't stored with file extensions. Locally, I can change the filename, but in production this isn't an option.
So because a filename looks like : B71637CB-A49C-0653-EF813918736BDEB7
This will not work:
<cfimage action="writeTobrowser" source="#FilePath#>
Same with
<img src="#FilePath#">.
So, any ideas on how I can work around this? Here's the code in context:
<cfdocument format="PDF" name="report" filename="#fileToDownloadimage#" overwrite="yes">
<cfdocumentsection>
<cfimage action="writeTobrowser" source="#FilePath#.jpg">
</cfdocumentsection>
</cfdocument>
So here's what ended up working:
<cfdocument format="PDF" name="report" filename="#fileToDownloadimage#" overwrite="yes">
<cfdocumentsection>
<cfset fileObject = fileReadBinary('#FilePath#') />
<cfset imageObject = imageNew(fileObject) />
<cfimage action="writeTobrowser" source="#imageObject#">
</cfdocumentsection>
</cfdocument>
Alex's answer got me down the right path so I'm perfectly happy to leave the kudos in place, cos I wasn't getting anywhere near this!
If you need to embed the images into the PDF document, try HTML's inline image capabilities:
<cfset fileLocation = "/path/to/images/B71637CB-A49C-0653-EF813918736BDEB7">
<cfset imageContent = fileReadBinary(fileLocation)>
<cfset imageContentAsBase64 = toBase64(imageContent)>
<cfoutput>
<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64, #imageContentAsBase64#" />
</cfoutput>
You can try creating a cfm page that outputs your content using cfcontent as in:
<cfcontent type="image/jpg" file="path/#fielpath#">
Then you would you include THAT cfm page as the source for your image as in
<img src="myFancyImageOuputer.cfm?image=#filepath#">
This should work but it may require some trial and error. :)
Ray has some additional tips here:
http://www.raymondcamden.com/2007/09/14/Serving-up-CFIMages-via-Image-Tags-and-a-NonCF-Friday-contest

Creating XLS file Using ColdFusion

I am trying to create a spreadsheet (.XLS file) using Adobe ColdFusion - 8.
The code that creates a spreadsheet is:
<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="Yes">
<cfset date_from = "#URL.date_from#">
<cfset date_to = "#URL.date_to#">
<cfset query_id="#URL.queryID#">
<cfquery name="GetEmps" datasource="cfdocexamples">
<!--- My SQL Queries Goes Here--->
</cfquery>
<cfcontent type="application/msexcel">
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="filename=Employees.xls">
<cfoutput>
<table cols="4">
<cfloop query="getData">
<tr>
<td>#uid#</td>
<td>#week#</td>
<td>#book_count#</td>
</tr>
</cfloop>
</table>
</cfoutput>
Whenever I run the page, an XLS sheet is created, but I cannot find any data. The size of the created XLS file is 0.
Please Note: The Query is correct(Since when I print the output as html, I can see the table without any error/warning).
** After reading comments: UPD**:
I had updated my code and only included important code snippet now.
UPD 2:
Whenever I commented the line <cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="Yes"> , xls file is created with expected data. However, when I opened the generated file, a dialogue appears:
Please note the spreadsheet generated is perfect. Only thing that is bothering me is the above warning.
Also Note: whenever I tried to open the spreadsheet in google-docs as a preview, it says, the file could not be opened due to corrupted format.
However, I am able to open it perfectly in an MS-Excel.
Even changing content type to : <cfcontent type="application/vnd.msexcel"> , I got the same warning.
While I cannot speak exactly how to implement this, I know the developers within my organization worked around it with the Apache POI. It seemed to do the trick for them. It does have to be completed with Java through Coldfusion. Here is an example of it.

Content-disposition being ignored in IE 9 and Firefox 13

I am trying to dynamically create an inline PDF that, when the user chooses to save it, prompts with my custom filename. According to the documentation, the saveasname attribute should do what I want.
(format="PDF" only) The filename that appears in the SaveAs dialog when a user saves a PDF file written to the browser.
However, what is happening in both IE 9 and in Firefox 13.0.1 is that the filename that appears in the SaveAs dialog is the same as my CF template, but with a PDF extension. (In other words, my code is in makepdf.cfm and the SaveAs prompts me to save makepdf.pdf.) In Chrome, however, it works perfectly. (All on Windows 7.)
Here is my code to create the PDF:
<cfdocument format="pdf" bookmark="true" saveasname="MyReport.pdf">
If I explicitly declare the content disposition and content type, like so
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="inline; filename=MyReport.pdf">
<cfcontent type="application/x-pdf">
<cfdocument format="pdf" bookmark="true" saveasname="MyReport.pdf">
Chrome tells me that "Content-Disposition" has been declared twice
Firefox tells me the PDF file is corrupt
IE just ignores it (and still doesn't show the right filename)
If I just rely on the header
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="inline; filename=MyReport.pdf">
<cfcontent type="application/x-pdf">
<cfdocument format="pdf" bookmark="true">
I get the same behavior as the first snippet of code.
I know how to get the browser to prompt for download rather than displaying inline, and everything works as expected then, but that's not the desired behavior.
I need to use times and dates in filenames and the end users are not savvy enough to keep from overwriting their files (should they choose to save them).
Is there something I'm missing that will get IE and Firefox to do what they're supposed to? What other browsers are going to do this? Mobile Safari?
The problem seems to be that "filename=xxx" was really intended for the "attachment" disposition, and not all the browser PDF plugins recognise it as a mechanism for specifying the inline "save as", as you've discovered.
A different approach to getting them all to use your preferred filename would be to manipulate the URL using web server rewrite rules. As a simple example you'd have your script for generating the pdfs and serving them inline: pdf.cfm
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="inline">
<cfdocument format="PDF" mimetype="application/pdf">Test</cfdocument>
Then create a re-write rule which matches URLs in the form /pdf/myfilename and passes them to pdf.cfm. On IIS7 this might be:
<rule name="Inline PDF SaveAs" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^/pdf/[\w-]+$" ignoreCase="true" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="/pdf.cfm" appendQueryString="false" />
</rule>
This will match filenames containing alphanumeric, underscore and hyphen characters only. You wouldn't want to allow spaces, or invalid filename characters.
When you access /pdf/myreport the PDF will be displayed inline by the plugin, and when you save it, the default filename will be myreport.pdf.
If you're using a framework which supports Search Engine Safe URLs or "routes", you could do the same without needing web server rewrites.
UPDATE: In fact you don't need to use URL rewriting: simply append a forward slash and then the desired filename to the CF script URL, e.g.
/pdf.cfm/myreport
The plugin will use whatever comes after the final slash as the "Save As..." name.
Make sure you use ATTACHMENT and not INLINE.
IE does NOT like INLINE and will open a word document as READ ONLY as well as not assuming the filename you give it.
Example:
<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="attachment; filename=#filename#.doc" charset="utf-8">
NOT
<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="inline; filename=#filename#.doc" charset="utf-8">
I would use the name attribute of the cfdocument tag which will store the contents in a variable. Then use the cfheader and cfcontent tags as you have above with the exception of replacing "inline;" with "attachment;"
I use code like this:
<cfdocument name="pdf"> ... </cfdocument>
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="attachment;filename=MyReport.pdf;" />
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" variable="#pdf#" />

Empty page displayed with cfcontent in a popup (unless manual refresh)

I have a ColdFusion page calling a cfm page as a popup through window.open(..). The target page is a cfm that loads a PDF file. The called page code is the following:
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" file="/deploy/cfusion.ear/cfusion.war/myPDF.pdf"/>
<cfflush>
<script language="javascript">
window.location.reload();
</script>
Unfortunately, I am getting only a blank page unless I manually refresh the page (going to the popup URL bar and hitting Enter) to have its contents displayed by the browser.
What is strange is that if I replace the caller page code from window.open() to document.url = the PDF is displayed without the need of refreshing the page.
Do you have any suggestions here how to call the target page as a popup and having it load without the need of a manual refresh?
Thanks.
The problem is that you are mixing javascript and PDF content together. It should really just be this:
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" file="/deploy/cfusion.ear/cfusion.war/myPDF.pdf"/>
This will return the full contents of that PDF to the browser.
What were you trying to do with the javascript code?
edit It sounds like it could be something to do with caching. To prevent that, try adding some cache control headers to your file:
<cfheader name="expires" value="#getHttpTimeString(now())#">
<cfheader name="pragma" value="no-cache">
<cfheader name="cache-control" value="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate">
<cfcontent type="application/pdf" file="/deploy/cfusion.ear/cfusion.war/myPDF.pdf"/>
If that doesn't work, try adding this one too:
<cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="attachment; filename=myPDF.pdf">
The solution I adopted was that of calling a proxy page and then that proxy page generates the PDF file. So:
window.open('2') // open in a popup the PDF
document.location = '3' // proxy
cfcontent type='application/pdf' file='...' // generate PDF
Why I cannot have 1 and 3 only is for now a mystery but in my case it works perfectly.

How do you write a image to browser as a binary stream in coldfusion?

I have a service on a Coldfusion 9 server that creates image banners on the fly for us. A separate machine has to save these files with something like:
wget http://myserver.com/services/local/bannerCreator/250x250-v3.cfm?prodID=3&percentSaving=19
The problem is that I can't think of how to get coldfusion to write out binary data without using a temporary file. At the minute the image is just displayed as an image tag like this:
<cfimage action = "writeToBrowser" source="#banner#" width="#banner.width#" height="#banner.height#" />
Any ideas? Or should I just use a temporary file?
I can't test because you're not giving any example code for how your images are generated, but have you tried something along this line?
<cfcontent reset="true" variable="#imageData#" type="image/jpg" />
Update: So I went ahead and created my own image; I'll assume you're doing something similar. This works perfectly for me:
<cfset img = imageNew("",200,200,"rgb","red") />
<cfcontent variable="#toBinary(toBase64(img))#" type="image/png" reset="true" />
This works without writing to file, and without using a virtual file system ("ramdisk")
If you have the binary bytes of an file/image, you can replace the output buffer with it's contents like so:
<cfscript>
// eg. this is how you get a file as a binary stream
// var fileBytes = fileReadBinary( '/path/to/your/file.jpg' );
// get the http response
var response = getPageContext().getFusionContext().getResponse();
// set the appropriate mime type
response.setHeader( 'Content-Type', 'image/jpg' );
// replace the output stream contents with the binary
response.getOutputStream().writeThrough( fileBytes );
// leave immediately to ensure no whitespace is added
abort;
</cfscript>
Pretty much what <cfcontent> does when you use reset="true"
The advantage of this method over <cfcontent> is that we can write it inside our cfscript based cfcs.
I found the solution above
<cfcontent variable="#toBinary(toBase64(img))#" type="image/png" reset="true" />
to not quite work for me.
Setting type="image/png" is just setting the mime type of the response. I don't think it's necessarily encoding the image as PNG. As such, generating a transparent png (image type "argb") was giving me odd colours, when compared to the <cfimage action = "writeToBrowser"...> method.
I figured that somehow I needed to explicitly encode the image data as PNG and output the binary data directly.
With some digging around in the underlying java, I came up with this, which so far seems to work for me.
This example draws a transparent png with a black circle.
<!--- create the image and draw it --->
<cfset img = ImageNew("", 23, 23, "argb")>
<cfset ImageSetDrawingColor(img, "black")>
<cfset ImageDrawOval(img, 0, 0, 21, 21, true)>
<!--- get the response object --->
<cfset response = getPageContext().getFusionContext().getResponse()>
<!--- set the response mime type --->
<cfset response.setHeader('Content-Type', 'image/png')>
<!--- get the underlying image data --->
<cfset bImage = ImageGetBufferedImage(img)>
<!--- get the magical object to do the png encoding --->
<cfset ImageIO = createObject("java", "javax.imageio.ImageIO")>
<!--- encode the image data as png and write it directly to the response stream --->
<cfset ImageIO.write(bImage, "png", response.getResponse().getOutputStream())>
I hope that helps someone!
Take out the height and width attributes and add the format attribute:
<cfimage action = "writeToBrowser" source="#banner#" format="png" />
wget should honor the redirection to the physical file CF creates in the CFFileServlet folder but if it doesn't there is a flag you can set to make it --max-redirect=10.
And as you suggest, a temporary file would work too. Just write the file and use cfheader and cfcontent to write it out. Just make sure to make the temp file name more unique.
<cfimage action="write" destination="tempfile.png" source="#banner#" format="png" />
<cfheader name="content-disposition" value="attachment; filename=banner.png" />
<cfcontent file="tempfile.png" deletefile="true" type="image/png" />
I do a similar thing, and you need to combine using tags and cfscript. There are image functions that are required. There are a lot of image functions available, once you have an image in memory as a variable. You can get the image into memory using CFFILE or CFHTTP or a number of other ways.
In my case, I read an image file into memory using CFIMAGE tag, then manipulate it with CFSCRIPT image functions by adding text to the bottom, then outputting the resulting image as a .png (or a .jpg if you prefer) to the browser. The only file stored on the server is the original image file. In your case instead of reading in an image you'd call it using a cfhttp tag as you already do. Here's my code:
<!---Get the image for processing ...--->
<cfimage action="read" source="#application.approotABS#\webcam\webcam.jpg" name="CamImage" />
<!--- prepare the text for overlay --->
<cfscript>
attr=structNew();
attr.font = "Arial";
attr.size = 15;
ImageSetDrawingColor(CamImage, "white");
ImageDrawText(CamImage, 'LIVE FROM STUDIO 1', 18,(ImageGetHeight(CamImage)-54), attr);
ImageDrawText(CamImage, '#ShowOnNow.showname#', 18,(ImageGetHeight(CamImage)-36), attr);
ImageDrawText(CamImage, datestring,18,(ImageGetHeight(CamImage)-18), attr);
</cfscript>
<!--- further down the page, output the manipulated image: ---->
<div class="webcam">
<cfimage action="writeToBrowser" source="#Camimage#" >
</div>
You can see it in action at http://hawkesburyradio.com.au/index.cfm?pid=111538
(I am using CF9 with Windows Server )