Question

I am writing a web-application using Play 1.2.3. One of the feature is to export a rendered HTML page as PDF. I already have the HTML template rendered dynamically based on the parameters sent by the server.
I am planning to use wkhtmltopdf to convert the rendered HTML to PDF. Is there a way in which I can intercept the final HTML (processed by the framework by replacing all template tags) for this purpose..? Or is there a better way to achieve this?

Answer 1

There is already a module for that : http://www.playframework.org/modules/pdf

If you want to do it yourself you can watch in the Controller class how a template is loaded and replace some part to get the rendered template as a string

protected static String renderTemplate(String templateName, Map<String,Object> args) {
    try {
        Template template = TemplateLoader.load(template(templateName));
        // Get the template into a String
        return template.render(args);
    } catch (TemplateNotFoundException ex) {
        if (ex.isSourceAvailable()) {
            throw ex;
        }
        StackTraceElement element = PlayException.getInterestingStrackTraceElement(ex);
        if (element != null) {
            throw new TemplateNotFoundException(templateName, Play.classes.getApplicationClass(element.getClassName()), element.getLineNumber());
        } else {
            throw ex;
        }
    }