PDF in all the browsers

[sriramsudheer]

HI all, I am creating PDF's using BIRT reports, I need to show 3 reports in same page. I tried the following tags: rich:mediaoutput (Lot of posts in jboss site but no one posted successful story)

iframe

Object, In jsp it is possible to use object tag but i am using JSF and .xhtml so i dont actually know how exactly to use this.

One more thing to that i cant actually save pdf to harddisk. So is there a way to show the bytestream as pdf in browser.

This is my sceniario and i need a feasible solution if possible.

[nickarls]

What keeps you from saving the PDF to the disk?

[sriramsudheer]

Hi Nicklas,

           From my requirement perspective i cant store the reports generated by Birt. I have to show it to the user through browser on fly. Actually i have to show multiple pdfs at the same time on fly in same page
            

[nickarls]

Never tried it but I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a byte[] when rendering with the API. Can you merge them into one or do they have to be in separate frames etc?

[sriramsudheer]

Hi Nicklas,
           I need to show PDF's seperately what i mean is i will generate 3 reports at the same time show them all in different frames in a single page

[richard1]

What you can do then is first, create a new page with three frames.  Then when that page renders on the browser, it will request each document separately - making that part of the requirement a non-event.

As far as pushing the PDFs out as files, the cleanest way I've found is to use a RESTful approach.  Then, when the file is requested, push it out as a byte array with something similar to this:

     public void sendFile(byte[] file, String contentType, String filename) throws IOException {
          if (file == null) {
               return;
          }
          FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
          HttpServletResponse servletResponse = (HttpServletResponse) fc.getExternalContext().getResponse();
          if (filename != null) {
               servletResponse.setHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + filename);
          }
          if (contentType != null) {
               servletResponse.setContentType(contentType);
          }
          ServletOutputStream os = servletResponse.getOutputStream();
          os.write(file);
          fc.responseComplete();
     }

If you don't specify a filename, it will generally be rendered in line (depending on browser settings, of course).

[richard1]

BTW, all you need to do to access it is to use a url such as /.../report.pdf?reportParam=2 for the 2nd frame, and something like this in your pages.xml:

<page view-id="/report.xhtml" action="#{fileRender.sendFile(someBean.pdf, 'application/pdf')}">
        <param name="reportParam" value="#{someBean.reportId}"/>
</page>

And yes, I didn't show a convenience method in the fileRender bean that passes a null for the filename :)  I've taken to using this approach for any binary files that need to be outputted - so many times I ran into problems with any of the JSF binary rendering tags I used.