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Del Murray · Guest

Is anyone using activePDF in an ISAPI application ??

Dan Ridenhour · Guest

"Del Murray" <delm (AT) mchsi (DOT) com> wrote:

Del Murray · Guest

Dan,

Well good luck. We will have to swap help because Delphi and activePDF
programmers are scarce as hen's teeth. I have a working app but in test mode
it doesn't do so good. I think that it has someithing to do with IE being
used by my app while WebGrabber is trying to also use it and IE is *not*
multi-threaded ... or at least it appears not to be so. Adobe Acrobat is
also giving me fits while testing, but acts ok when running in "production"
environment. When you get ready , I'll tell you what I did to get started
and If you see any holes we can hash it out. It appears to be an ok, not
perfect, product but is also the only game in town to turn at html string
into pdf.

Regards,
Del

Shiv Kumar · Guest

Del,

What I use is ReportBuilder with Pragnaans PsRbuilder Export Device. It's
really cool since I have the same reports in a regular GUI application and
an ISAPI as well.

Pragnaan has a similar thing for other report writers as well.

There is a demo running on my website. You can find it here

http://www.matlus.com/scripts/rbexportpdf.dll

The project file is at

ftp://www.matlus.com/RBExportPDF.zip

--
Shiv R. Kumar
The Delphi Apostle
http://www.matlus.com

DaveH · Guest

Yes. What would you like to know?

DaveH

"Del Murray" <delm (AT) mchsi (DOT) com> wrote

Shawn Pfaff · Guest

I am. Built a full PDF server/web service with RemObjects that does form
field substitution, flattening and sending. What ?'s do you have?

"Del Murray" <delm (AT) mchsi (DOT) com> wrote

Del Murray · Guest

Shiv,
My problem is a little more convoluted that just dumping out a report. My
users are not very computer literate. I have an app the already produces a
perfectly formated html document for them to print and use. The challenge
that I now face is that they must take that document and sever related
documents and file them together with the Federal Bankruptcy Court. The
court will only accept electronic filing and the only format they accept is
pdf. My currently produce the html docuement in their browser, then "print"
them to a pdf printer that is installed because they have Acrobat installed
on each machine. In order to file 5 related documents, the court system does
not accept an upload of 5 files.... no no... they must take each document
and assemble the separate PDF files into one larger PDF and submit the
larger PDF. Since they are processing as many as 400 law suites to gether,
this means that they have to keep track of these PDF's for each Defendant so
that they can put the right files together. Now most of these users are
little old ladies that have been working in these law firms for 40 years and
they just now swithed from DOS Wordperfect to MS products and MS Word so you
can imagine the hurdle I am having to jump over.

By using activePDF, i can take the response.content (my formatted html that
I already build) and under program control (not old lady control) convert it
to PDF then store it in a SQL Database and then again, under program
control, gather up the various stored PDF's and create a new PDF that is
ready to go to the courts. To ask a bunch of old biddys to do this for 400
defendants is like trying to herd cats ... it cant be done. The original
documents need to be formated as html because only html gives me the ability
to create documents , embed data and produce a formated documents acceptable
by the court systems. Active PDF is the only product I know of that will
take the generated html and turn it into a pdf and give the resultant pdf
back to me under program control so that I can process it further.

If you know of anything else that may solve this, I would be very glad to
entertain your suggestions.

Del

Del Murray · Guest

Dave,

I am haveing some stability problems. It is probably my fault. I am using
activePDF in an ISAPI. Here is what I did to get up and running (they have
virutally not documentation for Delphi).

I imported the WebGrabber and ActviePDFServer files to create _TLB files
which could be included in my 'uses' statements

To the best of my knowledge they are
wwwprintclientlib_tlb and prt2disklib_tlb which I created by importing
activex controls WGIEActiveX Ctrl Module and ActiveServer OLE Control Module
which were installed as part of the activePDF server installation.

I access them in my code by doing ....

wg := createoleobject('APWebgrabber.object');
ps := createoleobject('APServer.object');

where wg and ps are decalared as follows

wg, ps : olevariant;

my code is very simple. I want to take the contents of a tPageProducer and
turn it into a pdf ...

try
wg := createoleobject('APWebgrabber.object');
ps := createoleobject('APServer.object');

wg.url := 'http://www.dummyzzxxyy.com';
wg.createfromhtmltext := response.content;
wg.prt2disksettings := ps.ToString;

rv := wg.DoPrint('127.0.0.1', 64320);
rv := wg.Wait('127.0.0.1', 64320,30,'019');

if rv = 19 then begin
ps.FromString(WG.Prt2DiskSettings);
filename := ps.NewUniqueId + '.PDF';
PDFName := 'c:winntactivepdf' + Filename;
fs := tFileStream.Create(pdfName, fmShareDenyWrite);
fs.position := 0;
ts := tStringStream.create('');
ts.CopyFrom(fs,0);
end;
finally
wg.CleanUp('127.0.0.1', 64320);
end;

Sometimes it works fine 5 times in a row and then all of a sudden it causes
an addressing exception. All of this happens while running under control of
the debugger. It will never recover and act correctly again unless I reboot
the machine. I'm useing D5 ClientServer, SQL Server 2000, Win NT 4.0.
Occasionally the wg.wait command will return code 99 instead of crashing. I
think it may be because I am using IE while the server is also trying to use
IE to interpres the HTML. This would not occur in production since the
active server code will be running on an IIS server with no users acting
locally, whereas in my test environment I have every possible element
running on the same machine.
My real question is .. is my code correct, am I accessing the activeServer
controls properly (with CreateOleObject) ??? I am going to move the code to
a production like environment on Monday and test is in that mode. If it
proves stable, I am OK, if not I would appreciate your commenting on my
programming techniques here or advise me on what you did. Remember, my only
goal is to create a PDF from an existing html string which my program
already produces.

Thansk for the help,

Del

Del Murray · Guest

Shawn,
Please see my reply to DaveH above. Any help would be appreciated.

Del

Shiv Kumar · Guest

Del,

Do you *have* to generate this first document in html? I mean if you
generated all the documents in PDF yourself, then you don't even need a
fancy product to do this. There is a free component written in Delphi that
allows you to write to the "Canvas". If you've ever used the Printer object
in Delphi ten you'll know that this is a no brainer.

However, if your documents are complex, then you simply have to build a
report (we build such reports to submit to federal government agencies and
they are *exactly* as they require) and use what I suggested. Pragnaans
component works with a TStream and you have complete control over it so
instead it streaming it to the web server you can save it in a blob. When I
say report, I don't mean a query result kind of thing. I mean a "form" that
looks like it has been filled in. These forms range from 3 -62 printed
pages, and it's all designed in a WYSIWYG designer.

I believe you can do what you need to with what I suggested. I've used it
extensively in production software without a hitch. Besides, everything is
in Delphi :)

--
Shiv R. Kumar
The Delphi Apostle
http://www.matlus.com

Shiv Kumar · Guest

Hey Shawn,

Good to see you here!

--
Shiv R. Kumar
The Delphi Apostle
http://www.matlus.com

Del Murray · Guest

Shiv,

Ok, let me take it one step further and you can evaluate suitablity. I dont
*have* to do it in html, but here is why I do. The data is very dynamic. For
instance, a law suit may involve 1 to 10 defendants. In a law suit the
pleading always has what we call a "style" at the top. It is 3 colums and
follows a certain format. If I have to list multiple defendants, in the left
hand column and after listing them I have to show something like court case
number in the right hand column but only on the line where the last
defendant is named. That is probably a simple trick with the report
generator. The rest of the law suit is about 2 or 3 pages long and 95 % of
it is boiler plate text which I get from an html file that was built by a
program I wrote that takes an rtf file and converts it to html (nasty
program). There are places in the file where I need to plug in text which
may consist of naming lets say a 3 collatera items. The required format is

item 1, item2 and item 3

notice the comma and placement of the word "and". I have to know several
thing when I build this programatically. Where to place the comma, and when
(or if) to place the word "and". I can accomplish this because as you know,
the tPageProducer calls my action item when he encounters the <#xx> data tag
that is the html template. This allows me of course the ability to return
any size block of text that is formated anyway that I want and insert it
into the template. Each paragraph in a law suit is numbered. I may insert
sometimes need to insert a new paragraph (requiring a number) into a
document and that means the the next printed number can not be done under
control of the report builder because he doesnt know of the paragraph number
that I just inserted. If I leave numbering up to the reportbuilder it may
generate an orphaned paragarph number on the report (number but no
associated next).

There are so many issues that I dont know anyway to handle it other than
with the combo of pageproducers and data tags.

Now, if this report writer allows me to layout the report and specify places
where I want to insert programatically built data of any format I may be
able to use it. The one issue that continually comes up though is how to
build table formated data. It is so easy in html. Some times I need
signatures split to the left and right on the pages, block of indented text,
numberd and bulleted items, etc. I can do this with tables but what about
the report writer ???

I hope this gives you a better idea of the issues I have to over come. If
you see a way to solve this it would be great .

How do you take to generated report and turn it into pdf ? is that part of
the package and does the pdf file come back to you in a tstream of somekind
or does it go to a file and you have to read the resultant file into a
tfilestream?
I hate to pick your brain so much but I have really had an uphill battle
with this pdf issue. I would rather use a pure Delphi solution as you
suggested. Does it work ok under D5, I have never upgraded because I haven't
found a reason to yet.
Last but not lease, can I force it generate page breaks any where I want and
page numbers that are entirely under my control, ie, dont number first page
but number every page from 2 to the end of the document and put them on the
bottom of the page, not right after the last line of text and dont make me
insert blank lines to get the number on the bottom of the page .. page
footers would be nice.

Thanks for the advise,
Del

Dave Hackett · Guest

Hmmm. I've never used WebGrabber. I was drawing my own content and used
activePDF to convert it to PDF. It was the only product that allowed
multi-threading of the print process. A neccessaty since I too was using it
in an ISAPI app.

My first thought would be that WebGrabber is not as thread safe as their
ActiveSserver. Waiting for the document to render seems to be the area of
concern, especially if its the part that returns the 99 error code.
rv := wg.DoPrint('127.0.0.1', 64320);
rv := wg.Wait('127.0.0.1', 64320,30,'019');

Where do you declare your variants? In the procedure or in the WebModule?
It might help to free the variants so they can garbage collect by setting
them to nil (or is it null, I can't remember) in the finally section.

Also have you tried to throw multiple requests at it? I had a look at the
web site and nothing caught my eye about being thread safe - which was the
big promotional item for ActiveServer.

Now having said all that, I didn't end up using it very long Smile

It didn't
render my transparent graphics properly (I think it inverted the colors or
something). For rendering HTML I remember using the TWebBrowser component
and having it just print to the ActiveServer (BTW, it has to be the default
printer - you don't get the opportyunity to choose the printer). Here is
the article that tells you how to make TWebBrowser print.

http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,26402,00.html

D7's TWebBrowser now has a PrintToCanvas method. You could use that to
print to a MetaFileCanvas and then use that to "print" to many of the other
Delphi PDF libraries that don't install as printers. For example:
http://www.llion.net/ , http://www.synactis.com/products/pdf_delphi.htm ,
http://www.sedtech.com/isedquickpdf/

DaveH

"Del Murray" <delm (AT) mchsi (DOT) com> wrote

Shiv Kumar · Guest

Del,

I've read your description and I still feel this is doable using
ReportBuilder and the PDF device. I'll explain wherever applicable. I'm
assuming you use RB :)

Shiv Kumar · Guest

"Del Murray" <delm (AT) mchsi (DOT) com> wrote