Thank you for joining me for this video PDF plugin. For S for going University, I'm Bob Kuesick. In this lesson, we're going to talk about the PDF output plugin. And to do that, I've created a very simple sample that's going to write PDFs to disk and combine multiple PDFs together and build the smart client and the web client. Let's have a look at the customer report that I've created. It's a very simple report that has a title header, a header, and then it has two leading sub-summeries, one on country and one on city. And then it shows a bunch of merge fields that have all of the company information that I want to display. I made a form variable that holds the report title so I can have some simple methods that get called and I can run multiple types of reports simply by changing the sort order. Now I've made this code very verbose just for simplicity sake. In your actual code, you're probably going to have one function that actually does the sort and sets the title. But just for clarity sake, I've broken them all out into separate methods. So there's one to sort by city, one to sort by country and finally one to sort by company name. And depending on how it's sorted, those sub-summeries will kick in and give us the information that we're looking for. Now the GUI for this is very simple. There are three buttons. One that will give us customers by name and save it to disk. One that will give us customers by name and then rerun it by city and combine the two PDFs into one and again save it to disk. And then the third example will run it by country and city and save it actually into the database and then open it up as a PDF. So let's have a look at how that looks in both the smart client and the web client. So here I've opened them up side by side. On the left hand side is the right hand side is the smart client. And let's go ahead and run customers by name over here in the smart client. So here it was saved successfully. And on disk, I've just specified the temp directory. And if we open that up, here's cussed by name PDF. And here in the preview, you'll see that it's simply a list sorted by customer name. And I chose to write it out to the temp file on the top level of my C drive. Now let's go back to the smart client. Now for the second example, customers by name and city, this will again do it by customer name. Then it will run the report again and do the sub-summery by city and combine those into a single PDF. So let's see how that works. So it says PDF1 was saved successfully with 10 pages. And PDF2 was saved successfully with 13 pages. And here it gives me the total number of pages printed was 23. So if we take a look at this again in the file explorer, what we'll see is customer by name and city. So the first 10 pages will have just the customers by name. So here's the last customer by name. And then here's the second one, customers by city. So here you can see it's sub-summerized each customer by the city that they're in. Now let's go ahead back to the smart client. Customers by country and city will create another report. And it will save it into a media field inside of servoy. And then it will write it out to a temporary file and actually open it up in the native Acrobat Reader. So here total pages was 24. We click OK. And here we have a report both by customers and by country. And this was actually opened up natively in Adobe Reader on the client. Now let's have a look at how it works in the web client. So here in my web client, let's go ahead and run the same three. So first customers by name. And here you can see that it generated the same report, customers by name. And then open it up directly within the browser. Now I have a back button here. Now let's do customers by name and city. So remember, this is going to generate two different reports, one by name, one by city and then it's going to merge them together. So here's the one by name. And if we keep scrolling down, you'll see here's the one by city. So this works the same way as it done in the smart client, but this is in the web. Now let's have a look at the code behind this and see how it all works. So coming over here to my main JavaScript is our first method, which is customer by name to disk. So what we do is we call the sort company, then we tell the controller to print. And the options for the controller printing are show the current record only, which is set to false, show the printer select dialog, which is false. And then we use the plugin to get a PDF printer object. And then I've created my own method called get path. Let's take a look at that real quickly. The path will default to see temp, but if we're not in the smart client, then it's going to actually use the path to the root folder of the application server. So that the web client can go ahead and know where that file is. Then I've hard coded the name, cuspyname.pdf. And then I have another function called show dialog. And that's because I'm using both smart client and web client. Because I can't use the dialogs plugin in the web client, I just put a form variable on the form that shows how many pages were printed. Then in line 26, we say, hey, look, if we're not the smart client, then go ahead and show this URL. And that's what actually changes the page. When I use the show URL, one of the parameters is the target. So it says web client target as the second parameter. And there I've specified top, which means it will actually change the page, show it in the PDF preview. And the user would use the back button to go back to the solution. For our second example, we'll reprint two different reports and put them together is very much the same way. Except here, we start out by creating a meta print job. And then we get the path. And then we run the sort company. And we write that to that PDF printer. Then we give the users some feedback. We run the one that sorts it by city. Again, we print it to the same PDF printer that we got in line 43. Then we show the user some feedback and then we have a message for the total number of pages printed. And if we are in the smart client, we show a dialogue. If we're not in the smart client, what we do is we go ahead and again, we specify show URL with that top perimeter. And then in line 66, we actually end that meta print job. So the cool thing about the PDF printer is once you get a reference to a start meta print job, anything that you print will be output into that same job. And you can get the number of pages printed, the total number of pages printed. And it will create one single document, no matter how many things you print to it. Then finally, for our last example, where we save it to the media file, again, we start at the same way by making a plug-in call to start the meta print job. We're going to sort it by country. And then again, we print that report to the PDF printer. We sort it by city and then we print it again to that PDF printer. And then it shows the total number of pages. So in line 100 is where we actually save it to the database. In this example, I'm just using a form variable, but you would use a media column in your database. So we say Fv media equals and then plug-ins PDF output and meta print job. And that will take the output of that whole print job and write it to your database. Notice we call database manager save data. And we do that mainly for the web client so that it will be there immediately. And then I have another function that says show blob. So in line 156, the file name is made up of a UUID, which is a long string dot PDF. And this is to ensure that when clients are printing from both the web client and the smart client, no one's going to get a collision that they'll all see the document that they actually printed. Then we tell us it would write out the file using the file plug-in. And we specify the path and that media field. Then we use the path file and three slashes plus the path name and use show URL. And what this will do is this will pick out the correct helper application on the local client and open up the file. If it's not the smart client and we're in the web client, again, we need to specify the local host name, the file name, and then the target of self, self and top, work almost identically in that the user is taken to a new page and they can use the back button to return to your solution. One more thing I wanted to cover here in the PDF output plugin, you can combine PDF documents, whether they're in media fields in different records inside of your database or whether their physical PDF files on your operating system, you can combine them and again, save them, open them, whatever you'd like to do. You can also combine protected PDF documents by passing in the passwords. You can also take a PDF form and convert it into a document. This is something that's very cool. So you can have a PDF fill-in form. Once the user fills it out, you can basically then replace all of the fields with the values that the user entered and save that into its own PDF file. Now the PDF output plugin comes for free with servoy, it ships with the standard set of plugins. There are also a couple of other free alternatives that you can use too. There's a PDF Pro plugin by servoyguy at servoyguy.com. It's also an open source project that you can get on servoyforge. So Voig gives you a very easy way to create both static PDFs, combine PDFs, and use PDF forms and write them out to PDF documents. Thank you for watching.