Question

I have created a simple ASP.Net page to create self printable tickets so non-technical people can change the text and layout of a ticket. Obviously the user has to be logged in to be able to print their tickets.

When providing the URL for wkhtmltopdf to convert, the tickets are not created because wkhtmltopdf does not have a session to prove the user is logged in.

Is it possible to pass the session to wkhtmltopdf in the URL, or is their a better solution?

Answer 1

Yes, you can pass on sessions via URL, however, that’s kind of unnecessary.

Usually, you do something like:

http://xyz.com/tickets.php

Would contain:

<ul>
  <li>
    <a href="ticket.php?ticket=1">Ticket 1</a>
  </li><li>
    <a href="ticket.php?ticket=2">Ticket 2</a>
  </li><li>
    <a href="ticket.php?ticket=N">Ticket N</a>
  </li>
</ul>

And ticket.php:

<?php
    if( User->logged_in() ){

      $temp='C:\\windows\\temp\\tmp123546.html';

      file_put_contents($temp,'ticket html stuff');

      shell_exec('wkhtmltopdf.exe file:///'.str_replace('\\','/',$temp));

    }
?>

Note: I know you asked about this in ASP, but I don’t know much about it. However, the above info should be true to any web-based software, be it ASP, PHP, Ruby or Python.