toner

jsreport toner

node library for dynamic assembling documents and printing them into various formats (written for jsreport)

var toner = require("toner")();
toner.engine("jsrender", require("toner-jsrender"));
toner.recipe("wkhtmltopdf", require("toner-wkhtmltopdf")());
 
toner.render({
    template: { 
        engine: "jsrender",
        recipe: "wkhtmltopdf", 
        content: "<h1>{{:foo}}</h1>"
    },
    data: { foo: "hello world"}
}, function(err, res) {
    var pdfbuffer = res.content;
    var pdfstream = res.stream;    
});

Basics

Engines

Documents are assembled using javascript templating engines. The engine needs to be first registered in toner.

toner.engine("[engine name]", pathToEngineScript);

You can write your own engine or use an existing one:

• toner-handlebars
• toner-jsrender

Note that templating engine runs safely in another sand-boxed process. You don't have to be afraid to run user defined templates. See script-manager for details.

You can register and use none engine to skip its processing:

toner.engine('none', toner.noneEngine);
toner.render({
  template: {
    engine: 'none'   
    ...
  }

Recipes

The actual printing of the document into pdf, excel or any other type of the document is done by something we call recipe. The recipe also needs to be registered first.

toner.recipe("[recipe name]", function(req, res) { ... });

You can also write your own recipe or use an existing one:

• toner-phantom
• toner-html-to-xlsx
• toner-wkhtmltopdf

You can use html recipe to simply produce html:

toner.recipe("html", toner.htmlRecipe);
toner.render({
  template: {
    recipe: 'html'   
    ...
  }

Render

The complete document generation is invoked using toner.render function:

toner.render({
    template: { 
        engine: "jsrender",
        recipe: "wkhtmltopdf", 
        content: "<h1>{{:foo}}</h1>"
    },
    data: { foo: "hello world"}
}, function(err, res) {
    var pdfbuffer = res.content;
    var pdfstream = res.stream;    
});

The only parameter is an object representing rendering request. The request has following structure:

{
    //[required]
    template: { 
        //[required] templating engine used to assemble document
        engine: "jsrender",
        //[required] recipe used for printing previously assembled document
        recipe: "wkhtmltopdf", 
        //[required] template for the engine		
        content: "<h1>{{:foo}}</h1>",
        //javascript helper functions used by templating engines
        helpers: "function foo() { ...}" + 
                 "function foo2() { ... }"
        //any other settings used by recipes		 
        ...		 
    },
    //dynamic data inputs used by templating engines
    data: { foo: "hello world"}
    ...
}

The render callback then contains the response with

{
    //node.js buffer with the document
    content: ...
    //stream with the document
    stream: ...
    //http response headers with valid content type..
    headers: { ... }
}

Pipe the document to the http response

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    toner.render({...}, function(err, out) {
        out.stream.pipe(res);
    });
}).listen(1337, '127.0.0.1');

Hooks

It is expected there will soon popup other packages hooking into the Toner and adding additional functionality. For this case Toner provides several hooks which can be used to extend it.

toner.before(function(req, res, cb) { ... });
toner.after(function(req, res, cb) { ... });
toner.afterEngine(function(req, res, cb) { ... });

Options

Calling Toner accepts some options as the parameter

var toner = require("toner")({ ... });

Possible options:

• tempDirectory - this attribute is used by the recipes to store temporary files
• options passed to the script-manager depndency

Tests

npm install
npm test

Contributions

Yes, please.

License

MIT