Any way to create PDF file with wkhtmltopdf without returning HttpResponse or using URL? I just want to attach PDF file to email

Question

I am using wkhtmltopdf wrapper to generate template into PDF in Django 1.6. It works fine when I want to display the PDF afterwards or send the PDF file with HttpResponse for download but what I want to do is to create the file in my tmp folder and attach it to an email.

I am not sure how to achieve this.

# views.py

context = {
    'products_dict': products_dict,
    'main_categories': main_categories,
    'user_category': user_category
}

response = PDFTemplateResponse(request=request,
                               context=context,
                               template="my_template.html",
                               filename="filename.pdf",
                               show_content_in_browser=True,
                               cmd_options={'encoding': 'utf8',
                                            'quiet': True,
                                            'orientation': 'landscape',
                                           }
                               )

return response

The code above generate the PDF exactly how I want it. The thing is I don't want to display the PDF in the browser or start a download (I don't want to return response). I just want to create it and then attach the file to an email like this:

email = EmailMessage()
email.subject = "subject"
email.body = "Your PDF"
email.from_email = "[email protected]"
email.to = [ "[email protected]", ]

# Attach PDF file to the email
email.attach_file(my_pdf_file_here)
# Send email
email.send()

I tried to use subprocess but it doesn't seem like I can send context to my template to render it before generating the PDF.

Dawn

You can do this by encode pdf file with base64 and appending to message body. – Joel

Attaching the file to the email is not a problem. The problem is to create the PDF file with wkhtmltopdf without returning an HttpResponse or using a URL/Class-based view – Dawn

Oh! Im sorry. Can't you just write output of the wkhtmtopdf to into a file in binary mode? – Joel

I don't know how to produce the PDF output in my view without returning HttpResponse – Dawn

In your example, return is not looks like HttpResponse. Unless if wkhtmltopdf output is. If output of wk is HttpResponse object I guess you need to do some workaround. – Joel

Can you checkout the type of response object? – Joel

Answer 1

Your issue is not with wkhtmltopdf, but the django-wkhtmltopdf which provides some class-based views that it renders with wkhtmltopdf. If you don't want a view, you don't need to use them: you could just render the template yourself and pass the result string to the command-line wkhtmltopdf tool.

It looks like the django-wkhtmltopdf library does provide some utility functions (in the utils directory) which might make that last stage a bit easier.

Aeromarine

This is exactly what I was looking for ! from here: github.com/incuna/django-wkhtmltopdf/blob/master/wkhtmltopdf/… I could use the wkhtmltopdf function. One question though, How can I render my template with my context variables before passing it to the wkhtmltopdf function? – Dawn

You can use the render_to_string shortcut. – Aeromarine

I'm confused what to do with the string afterwards... I need to provide a file path or URL of the html to be converted to the wkhtmltopdf function. – Dawn

You can use a tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile, as they do in the view. – Aeromarine

I ended up using render_to_temporary_file method. Check my EDIT for what I did. Thank you Daniel ! – Dawn

Answer 2

My Work around
The problem here, while sending mail with pdf file attached is, email.attach takes bytes-like object, but we have pdftemplate response object.

I tried to convert it to bytes by few ways, but ended up with errors. So, i just randomly went into the definition of PDFTemplateResponse class, then I found rendered_content method in it, thanks to vs code for making it easier.
Then what i just did is write the below line, and it worked!

email.attach("mypdf.pdf", response.rendered_content, 'application/pdf')

PS: This is the first time I am posting something on stack overflow. So, pardon my mistakes.

Lozenge

Answer 3

The answer provided has become outdated as render_to_temporary_file is no longer a method of PDFTemplateResponse.

I haven't attempted to email PDFs, but to save a generated PDF to a Django model's file field, you can proceed as follows:

from wkhtmltopdf.views import PDFTemplateResponse
from io import BytesIO
from django.core.files import File
from django.http import HttpRequest
    
request = HttpRequest()

context = {
   'order' : order,
   'items' : order.ordered_products.all()
}

response = PDFTemplateResponse(
    request=request, 
    context=context, 
    template="products/order_pdf.html",
    cmd_options={
        'encoding': 'utf8',
        'quiet': True
    }
)
    
my_model.pdf_field.save(
        response.filename, File(BytesIO(response.rendered_content)))

It should be easy to email the PDF from there.

Pensile

Answer 4

2023: looking through wkhtmltopdf.utils I found this. Much simpler.

from wkhtmltopdf.utils import render_pdf_from_template

# Generate a pdf from template
pdf = render_pdf_from_template('template.html',
                                    None, None,
                                    context=context)

# Save the pdf somewhere
with open('test.pdf', "w+b") as f:
    f.write(pdf)

# Return a response
return render(request, 'index.html')

Uria

Answer 5

Hey Please check your wkhtmltopdf binary is it executable or not. as this PDFTemplateResponse worked for me.

Leap

Answer 6

response = PDFTemplateResponse(
    request,
    template='reports/report_email.html',
    filename='weekly_report.pdf',
    context=render_data,
    cmd_options={'load-error-handling': 'ignore'})



subject, from_email, to = 'reports', '[email protected]', '[email protected]'
html_content = render_to_string('reports/report_email.html',render_data)
text_content = strip_tags(html_content)
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.attach('pdf_filename.pdf', response.rendered_content, 'application/pdf')
msg.send()

this code snippet may help you after placing it in views.py.

Umbles

Answer 7

Thanks to Daniel Roseman for the help to go towards what I wanted. I did use the tests file of wkhtmltopdf here: http://pydoc.net/Python/django-wkhtmltopdf/1.1/wkhtmltopdf.tests.tests/

This is what I did in my view:

order = Order.objects.get(id=order_id)
return_file = "tmp/" + 'order' + str(order_id) + '.pdf'

context = {
    'order' : order,
    'items' : order.ordered_products.all()
}

response = PDFTemplateResponse(
    request=request, 
    context=context, 
    template="'products/order_pdf.html'",
    cmd_options={
        'encoding': 'utf8',
        'quiet': True
    }
)

temp_file = response.render_to_temporary_file("products/order_pdf.html")

wkhtmltopdf(pages=[temp_file.name], output=return_file)

You can then use the return_file in email.attach() method like this:

email.attach_file(return_file)

You can also omit output parameter in the wkhtmltopdf method. Then the method will return the output and use this output in attach_file() method.

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_{This answer was posted as an edit to the question Any way to create PDF file with wkhtmltopdf without returning HttpResponse or using URL? I just want to attach PDF file to email by the OP dguay under CC BY-SA 3.0.}

Mielke