What am I missing?
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I'm not sure I understand the benefit of using jsreport in an asp dotnet MVC web application. I already have data-binding with Angularjs and printing to PDF is not that difficult. What am I missing?
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well i would say that for simple cases and when rendering pdf directly in the browser is a viable option, your solution is fine. jsreport is a reporting platform, which means that it is designed to render reports in scale and to centralize the reporting logic of a business in one place, we do that by separating the reporting part of your app into its own standalone app/server handled by jsreport (one can call it a microservice), which allows to handle a lot of traffic and rendering requests, something important in most business that need to generate a lot of reports. jsreport also has a lot of utilities and features (like the studio, server side scripting that lets you do anything you want, scheduling, saving reports to external stores like S3, Azure, saving report source (template files) in filesystem, databases, etc., the ability to better organize your report entities in one place and to easily make it versionable, and others) that comes handy when designing a report and most important when designing the report flow of a business.
i agree with you that in simple cases it seems more easy to render in the browser with something like Angular (btw we also have jsreport-core designed to handle more simple cases too, and also of course you can use Angular in your jsreport's templates too), but the real benefit of using jsreport comes later.. when you need to handle something in scale and more organized, we have already done the heavy work of shaping all the pieces, so why not? 😄 hope that i've been able to help in you in something
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I'm curious as to which html to pdf technology you are using? Are you simply relying on the user to save the page as a pdf file?
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@charlieknoll well it depends, in jsreport we have the concept of recipe, which is just the underlying logic that converts template and data input into report output, the format of the report output (pdf, excel, word, etc) will depend on the kind of logic present in the recipe used. for example, for reports in pdf we have recipes that use the following technologies:
phantomjs,electron,chrome-headless,apache fop,wkhtmltopdf,weasyprint, each technology has its own tradeoffs and the great thing is that you can choose the appropriate one for your case by just changing the recipe used in your template (at least for the cases that conversion is html -> pdf). so the quick answer to your question is:I'm curious as to which html to pdf technology you are using? Are you simply relying on the user to save the page as a pdf file?
it depends on the kind of recipe that you use.
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Sorry, I should have cc'd @vbmark the question, it was meant for the original post. I was wondering how @vbmark was generating pdf's client side.
