I'd like to create an application that would run on Google's appengine.
However, this application needs to be able to generate PDFs dynamically.
How could I do this?
+13
A:
You can use the reportlab library to generate a PDF from Python. You can just include the ReportLab files in with your application's code, or you can include a zip archive of the ReportLab code, and insert it into your application's sys.path.
Paul Fisher
2008-11-29 17:40:17
Does reportlab actually work under AppEngine? I was under the possibly-mistaken impression that it uses C extensions, which AppEngine doesn't allow.
Robert Rossney
2009-01-08 21:38:40
Reportlab is pure Python, but it uses PIL for images, so you won't be able to use it for PDFs containing images.
Nick Johnson
2009-01-09 11:13:28
GAE now supports PIL so that should not be a problem.
Federico Builes
2009-06-04 15:32:05
Does this actually work? Reading the reportlab API, you seem to have to write to a file. That's not possible on GAE.
Gareth Simpson
2009-08-09 08:22:46
You can write to any file-like object, meaning that you could write to, say, `response.out`. For example, http://konryd.blogspot.com/2008/04/outputting-pdfs-with-google-app-engine.html
Paul Fisher
2009-08-09 11:39:28
Thanks. Note, I needed the fix referred to by @varun below
Gareth Simpson
2009-08-29 16:21:06
+3
A:
To overcome the number-of-files limit in google appengine, you could package your reportlib in a zip file and use it. Be sure you check out this issue i bumped into..
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1085
Also, you can use pisa, htmllib and pyPdf to generate the pdf using html templates.
All the best.
varun
varun
2009-04-25 18:35:55