Dynamically generate PDF and email it using django

Question

I have a django app that dynamically generates a PDF (using reportlab + pypdf) from user input on an HTML form, and returns the HTTP response with an application/pdf MIMEType.

I want to have the option between doing the above, or emailing the generated pdf, but I cannot figure out how to use the EmailMessage class's attach(filename=None, content=None, mimetype=None) method. The documentation doesn't give much of a description of what kind of object content is supposed to be. I've tried a file object and the above application/pdf HTTP response.

I currently have a workaround where my view saves a pdf to disk, and then I attach the resulting file to an outgoing email using the attach_file() method. This seems wrong to me, and I'm pretty sure there is a better way.

Answer 1

Based on the example in your link:

message.attach('design.png', img_data, 'image/png')

Wouldn't your content for a pdf just be the same output that you would normally write to the pdf file? Instead of saving the generated_pdf_data to myfile.pdf, plug it into the content field of the message.attach:

message.attach('myfile.pdf', generated_pdf_data, 'application/pdf')

Answer 2

Ok I've figured it out.

The second argument in attach() expects a string. I just used a file object's read() method to generate what it was looking for:

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage

message = EmailMessage('Hello', 'Body goes here', '[email protected]',
    ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'], ['[email protected]'],
    headers = {'Reply-To': '[email protected]'})
attachment = open('myfile.pdf', 'rb')
message.attach('myfile.pdf',attachment.read(),'application/pdf')

I ended up using a tempfile instead, but the concept is the same as an ordinary file object.