Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

PDF Generation on the Client

AlivePDF is an open source library for generating PDFs in ActionScript on the client side. It’s offered under the MIT license at http://alivepdf.org; download AlivePDF.swc and link it to your Flex Builder project. One of the classes included in AlivePDF.swc is called PDF.

Note

Unless you are developing an AIR application or deploying it for Flash Player 10 (see the next note), even client-generated PDF content has to be sent to a server that will just bounce it back (see Example 11-20) to have the web browser open the Acrobat Reader plug-in.

Basic Printing with AlivePDF

The process of generating PDFs in AlivePDF starts with instantiation of the PDF class, specifying the print orientation, units of measurement, and the paper size. Then you create and add pages to the instance of the PDF object, and finally you call the function savePdf() to turn these pages into a ByteArray and save them to the PDF file on your filesystem if you use Adobe AIR. If this is a web application written in Flex, the same savePdf() function sends the ByteArray to the server with the deployed script create.php (supplied by alivepdf.org), which will return this array of bytes to your web browser as a PDF document.

Note

Starting from Flash Player 10, the FileReference class allows you to save files locally. Its function save() opens the pop-up window, allowing the user to specify the filename for saving the data. In our example, this eliminates the need for a round trip to the server ...