This post was originally published on my Blog, check it out for more contents.
Introduction
I was working on a project recently and I got a unique(for me) requirement that needed me to generate pdf file from an array of values in the Browser, usually in my little experience in software development Pdf files are generated in the backend using Puppeteer for node js and FPDF for PHP e.t.c. So I had to look for a React library that could work for my use case, lucky for me I found React-pdf. I found other libraries like @progress/kendo-react-pdf but I decided to go with React-pdf because of its developer-friendly documentation.
The library was built by Diego Muracciole and also maintained by him.
So in the tutorial/ blog post, I will try to explain briefly how react-pdf works and also walk you through how to generate PDf from an array of objects coming from the Moviedb Api.
Features
While going through the documentation when I was trying to pick the appropriate library for my use-case there were some features of React-pdf that convinced me to use it, I will briefly talk about them:
Components
React-Pdf uses React-Primitives spec to create custom components that you can use to create and structure your PDF documents.
These components include:
- Document
- Page
- View
- Image
- Text
- Link
- Note
- Canvas
- PDFViewer
- PDFDownloadLink
- BlobProvider
You can checkout the docs for more details on what each component above does, Basically the components about help you create pdf using JSXesques syntax.
Styling
Now that we have an idea of how to create the PDF document how do we style it? React-pdf provides powerful styling solution using the StyleSheet API which helps you style your document using CSS, Media queries and Flexbox. Check the docs for the CSS properties they support.
What if you are a big fan of CSS-in-JS? well, they also support the entire styled-components API.
Fonts
React-Pdf has a
Font API that helps you load fonts from different sources and use in your PDF document.
Those were some of the features that made me pick React-pdf. Also when I checked the Github Repository the maintainer Diego Muracciole is quite active and tries to respond to most issues opened.
Demo
So I will briefly work you through a simple example of generating pdf from the MoviesDB API. This demo is going to demonstrate generating the best movies of the year.
Folder Structure
project │ package.json │ │ └───Public │ │ 150.png │ │ index.html │ │ star.png │ │ │ └───src │ Movie.jsx │ MovieList.jsx | constant.js | index.js | styles.css
index.js(entry)
import React from "react"; import ReactDOM from "react-dom"; import MovieList from "./MovieList"; import "./styles.css"; function App() { return ( <div className="App"> <MovieList /> </div> ); } const rootElement = document.getElementById("root"); ReactDOM.render(<App />, rootElement);
The index.js is the entry point of the application. It renders the
<MovieList/> which is the parent component of our application.
MovieList.jsx
import React, { useState } from "react"; import Axios from "axios"; import { PDFDownloadLink } from "@react-pdf/renderer"; import { API_KEY } from "./constants"; import { PdfDocument } from "./Movie"; const years = [ { value: "2010", text: "2010" }, { value: "2011", text: "2011" }, { value: "2012", text: "2012" }, { value: "2013", text: "2013" }, { value: "2014", text: "2014" }, { value: "2015", text: "2015" }, { value: "2016", text: "2016" }, { value: "2017", text: "2017" }, { value: "2018", text: "2018" }, { value: "2019", text: "2019" } ]; export default function MovieList() { const [year, setYear] = useState(""); const [movieDetails, setDetails] = useState([]); const [show, setHide] = useState(false) const fetchMovie = async e => { setYear(e.target.value); try { let res = await Axios( `{API_KEY}&primary_release_year=${year}&sort_by=vote_average.desc` ); setDetails(res.data.results); setHide(true) } catch (error) { console.log(error); } }; return ( <div className="container"> <h2>Best movies of the year</h2> <label htmlFor="movies">Select Year</label> <select id="movies" className="select" onChange={fetchMovie}> <option defaultValue="" disabled> Select your option </option> {years.map((year, index) => { return ( <option key={index} value={year.value}> {year.text} </option> ); })} </select> {show &&<PDFDownloadLink document={<PdfDocument data={movieDetails} />} fileName="movielist.pdf" style={{ textDecoration: "none", padding: "10px", color: "#4a4a4a", backgroundColor: "#f2f2f2", border: "1px solid #4a4a4a" }} > {({ blob, url, loading, error }) => loading ? "Loading document..." : "Download Pdf" } </PDFDownloadLink>} </div> ); }
The
MovieList.jsx component contains most of the logic in this application. we import
PDFDownloadLink from
@react-pdf/renderer, this is basically an anchor tag that enables us to generate and download PDF documents.
PDFDownloadLink accepts a
document props which are the PDF template we will be creating soon using some of the React-primitives listed early in this post. It also accepts a
filename prop that can be used to define the filename of the PDF document, a
style prop to add inline styling to the link tag, a
className prop if you prefer using classes to style and
children prop which is the anchor tag contents.
Movie.jsx
import React from "react"; import { Page, Text, View, Document, StyleSheet, Image } from "@react-pdf/renderer"; import moment from "moment"; const POSTER_PATH = ""; const styles = StyleSheet.create({ page: { backgroundColor: "#ffffff" }, section: { margin: 10, padding: 10, flexGrow: 1 }, movieContainer: { backgroundColor: "#f6f6f5", display: "flex", flexDirection: "row", padding: 5 }, movieDetails: { display: "flex", marginLeft: 5 }, movieTitle: { fontSize: 15, marginBottom: 10 }, movieOverview: { fontSize: 10 }, image: { height: 200, width: 150 }, subtitle: { display: "flex", justifyContent: "space-between", flexDirection: "row", width: 150, alignItems: "center", marginBottom: 12 }, vote: { display: "flex", flexDirection: "row" }, rating: { height: 10, width: 10 }, vote_text: { fontSize: 10 }, vote_pop: { fontSize: 10, padding: 2, backgroundColor: "#61C74F", color: "#fff" }, vote_pop_text: { fontSize: 10, marginLeft: 4 }, overviewContainer: { minHeight: 110 }, detailsFooter: { display: "flex", flexDirection: "row" }, lang: { fontSize: 8, fontWeight: 700 }, vote_average: { fontSize: 8, marginLeft: 4, fontWeight: "bold" } }); export function PdfDocument(props) { console.log("pdf props", props.data); return ( <Document> <Page style={styles.page}> {props.data ? props.data.map((a, index) => { return ( <View key={index} style={styles.movieContainer}> <Image style={styles.image} source={ a.poster_path !== null ? `${POSTER_PATH}${a.poster_path}` : "150.jpg" } /> <View style={styles.movieDetails}> <Text style={styles.movieTitle}>{a.title}</Text> <View style={styles.subtitle}> <View style={styles.vote}> <Image source="star.png" style={styles.rating} /> <Text style={styles.vote_text}>{a.vote_count}</Text> </View> <View style={styles.vote}> <Text style={styles.vote_pop}>{a.popularity}</Text> <Text style={styles.vote_pop_text}>Popularity</Text> </View> </View> <View style={styles.overviewContainer}> <Text style={styles.movieOverview}>{a.overview}</Text> </View> <View style={styles.detailsFooter}> <Text style={styles.lang}> Language: {a.original_language.toUpperCase()} </Text> <Text style={styles.vote_average}> Average Votes: {a.vote_average} </Text> <Text style={styles.vote_average}> Release Date:{" "} {moment(a.release_date, "YYYY-MM-DD").format( " MMMM D Y" )} </Text> </View> </View> </View> ); }) : ""} </Page> </Document> ); }
This
Movie.jsx component is the template of the PDF we are generating, Here we define how the structure of the PDF using React-primitives(VIEW, DOCUMENT) and also style. So I'd briefly talk about the some of React-pdf API's I used here.
StyleSheet.create(): It helps you define the styles you want to use in the document, It accepts an object containing all the CSS you want to use in the Document and it returns an object which you can apply to any of the PDF elements via the
styleprop.
Document: The
PDFDownloadLink
documentprop accepts only a component of type
Documentso this must be the root of your components when creating the PDF template and accepts only child of type
Page, The
Documentis simply a wrapper around your PDF template and it accepts some optional props
Page: This indicates a Page in the document and you can have multiple
Pagesin a document. It accepts some props to define the
sizeof the page,
orientationor if you want page wrapping
wrap. props
View: I will like to compare this component to the HTML
div, it helps you section or divide the document. props
Text: This component is used for displaying text on the document and applying styles to it. props
Image: This component is used for displaying images(network or local) on the document, these images could be PNG, JPG or base64.
Demo Application
Conclusion
Before I used this library I never thought it was possible to generate PDF on the client-side, Not only does react-pdf allow you do that but get to use JSXesque syntax to structure and design the PDF document. I know the demo is quite trivial but I think this library might be useful in some use cases.
Discussion (18)
Thanks for this! If anyone is curious about a real-life use case, I'm doing the same thing at work right now...
I probably have visited React-pdf site several months ago, I am not sure. But then I found pdfmake, I tried it and it met my requirements, so I have been using it until now.
However, maybe I will give React-Pdf a try.
In this example, I can quickly get PDF doc, however, on my project, I want to get data-table report, and it is too slow... after 5 minutes, I canceled.
Do you think is there a reason for this?
Here is my code:
Can you a simple demo in codesandbox
Hi Nero,
There are PDF Render codes on my question post, jsFiddle, HTML section.
fields and records array, and this is simple structure.
I guess, for each styling property, renderer works too much. When try to minimize styling it renders quicker.
Like Nero says.... if you want help from anyone put your example up on a sandbox that properly supports playing with react.
I have tried it yesterday. Seeing that the document used JSX, I thought it could contain HTML element. But I was disappointed, because it didn't support HTML element at all. My goal is to use HTML table in this react-pdf library, because my app deals with data records that will be displayed in tabular format, like in HTML table.
This means I still have to find my own way in order to display my data in tabular format, using only available features in this library : view, text and styles.
You'd have to do something around the use of the Text component and some awesome styling to implement your own table
Could not find module in path: '@react-pdf/unicode-properties' relative to '/node_modules/@react-pdf/fontkit/dist/fontkit.browser.es.js'
Hello Nero its a wonderful solution , Thanks for that , I have a requirement where i have a download button in a table rows , so on click of download button of a specific row of table i need make a API call to get the details which need to be displayed in PDF, How can we achieve this using this solution . Thanks . Waiting for the reply :)
I tried downloading pdf from your codesandbox but the pdf is empty.
Is there anything wrong here ?
Did you select a year first? I just modified it to hide the download tag until you have selected a year. If it still doesnt work then tell me
I tried to install using
webpack(with Razzle.js), but keep getting error:
Do you know how to fix this ?
I selected year, but the page still shows "Loading please wait". I also, developed the similar page and seeing the same response when the content is more than 1 page of PDF.
Can you please help me to resolve this issue?
return (
I was stuck really bad. You save me big time. Thank you so much !!!
I am trying to make this work with Gatsby. Anyone had any luck with this?
Thanks for the detailed explanantion, Is there any way i can use input tag as custom components? because when i try i get this error
Error: Invalid element of type input passed to PDF renderer
you missed this part:
github.com/lelandrichardson/react-...
If you read that repo, you'll discover that it's not rendering with the default set of html components that react normally understands.