Peter Moelgaard's Blog

The Midnightcoders has taken the consequence of a lot of clients requesting integrated PDF generation and build it into WebORB (initially only for .NET, but soon to come for Java and PHP).

It comes fully functional with a Server Extension and a Client library making usage of it really simple. It eventually does what we have been forced to in numerous occasions… (1) dump a component to bitmap, (2) parse it into an image, (3) post the image to the server, (4) convert the image to PDF and save it to disk, (5) respond an URL back to the Client, (5) have the client request the URL from the server triggering a download prompt, (6) delete the PDF on the server…

Now we get this rather cumbersome and all else being equal non-trivial task, integrated into the Application Server…

(Ref. http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/pdfgen/dotnet/index.htm)

Once installed and configured correctly, creating the PDF is as simple as this code-snippet…

<mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
    import com.tmc.weborb.pdf.PDFGenerator;

    public
function createPDF():void
    {
      var template:MyTemplate = new MyTemplate();
      var pdfgen:PDFGenerator = new PDFGenerator( this );
      pdfgen.generatePDF( template );
    }
  ]]>
</mx:Script>

 (Ref. http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/pdfgen/dotnet/quickstart/flex_and_pdf_quickstart.htm)

However, is customized rendering necessary, there is full access to the functionality of the PDF generator through the API and SDK that comes along allowing for what seems to cover most needs… quick glances has a tendency not to reveal shortcomings, but Mark Piller and The Midnightcoders are generally quite clever about this so there is some reason to believe that they have thought of most scenarios that at least I will encounter.

Anyways… check it out…
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/pdf-generator/overview.html