reactjs - Generating a PDF file from React Components

Question

I have been building a polling application. People are able to create their polls and get data regarding the question(s) they ask. I would like to add the functionality to let the users download the results in the form of a PDF.

For example I have two components which are responsible for grabbing the question and data.

<QuestionBox />
<ViewCharts />

I'm attempting to output both components into a PDF file. The user can then download this PFD file. I have found a few packages that permit the rendering of a PDF inside a component. However I failed to find one that can generate PDF from an input stream consisting of a virtual DOM. If I want to achieve this from scratch what approach should I follow ?

Answer 1

Rendering react as pdf is generally a pain, but there is a way around it using canvas.

The idea is to convert : HTML -> Canvas -> PNG (or JPEG) -> PDF

To achieve the above, you'll need :

1. html2canvas &
2. jsPDF

import React, {Component, PropTypes} from 'react';

// download html2canvas and jsPDF and save the files in app/ext, or somewhere else
// the built versions are directly consumable
// import {html2canvas, jsPDF} from 'app/ext';


export default class Export extends Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
  }

  printDocument() {
    const input = document.getElementById('divToPrint');
    html2canvas(input)
      .then((canvas) => {
        const imgData = canvas.toDataURL('image/png');
        const pdf = new jsPDF();
        pdf.addImage(imgData, 'JPEG', 0, 0);
        // pdf.output('dataurlnewwindow');
        pdf.save("download.pdf");
      })
    ;
  }

  render() {
    return (<div>
      <div className="mb5">
        <button onClick={this.printDocument}>Print</button>
      </div>
      <div id="divToPrint" className="mt4" {...css({
        backgroundColor: '#f5f5f5',
        width: '210mm',
        minHeight: '297mm',
        marginLeft: 'auto',
        marginRight: 'auto'
      })}>
        <div>Note: Here the dimensions of div are same as A4</div> 
        <div>You Can add any component here</div>
      </div>
    </div>);
  }
}