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What is PDFfer?

PDFfer is a Spring Boot library that adds PDF generation capabilities to your Spring Boot applications, in a simple effective manner. It is

Pluggable: You just drop a dependency to it in your application, and you can start using it
Extensible: It is easy to add more templates to it, meaning you can create all sorts of documents easily
Configurable: All aspects of the library can be easily adapted to your needs with simple Spring properties

If you’re curious about why I created PDFfer, click here!

PDFfer on Pluralsight

If you have access to Pluralsight, you can watch my Spring Boot course that uses PDFfer to teach some advanced Spring Boot concepts.

If you don’t have access, you can get a trial subscription from this page.

PDF Templates

PDFfer uses a templating system in order to generate PDFs and it has a registry of templates that anyone can contribute to.

The PDFfer library itself does not come with any templates. There are two sample templates available in the nekosoft-itext-templates.

Getting Started

Just add a dependency on the pdffer-starter library to your application. This will add everything you need through auto-configuration, so make sure that Spring autoconfiguration is enabled in your project.

Gradle builds should include this dependency

implementation 'org.nekosoft.pdffer:pdffer-starter:1.0.0'

Maven builds should include this dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.nekosoft.pdffer</groupId>
    <artifactId>pdffer-starter</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Remember that PDFfer does not come with any templates, therefore in order to be able to generate PDF documents you will need to add at least one template library, such as the nekosoft-itext-templates library.

Adding the sample template library with Gradle

implementation 'org.nekosoft.pdffer:nekosoft-itext-templates:1.0.0'

Adding the sample template library with Maven

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.nekosoft.pdffer</groupId>
    <artifactId>nekosoft-itext-templates</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

In the most common scenarios, all you have to do is autowire the PdfferProducerBean into your service or web controller beans and invoke the generatePdfDocument method to get the contents of the PDF document as an array of bytes. The method takes the name of a template, the group it belongs to, and the payload of the document - the payload is the data that a template needs in order to generate the PDF, so as to fill in the layout structure with dynamic data.

For example, in order to generate an invoice PDF, you could do the following

@Component
public class ConsoleAppBean implements CommandLineRunner {
    @Autowired
    private PdfferProducerBean pdffer;

    @Override
    public void run(String... args) throws Exception {
        InvoiceData data = new InvoiceData();
        // set up the invoice data here
        byte[] output = pdffer.generatePdfDocument("nekosoft", "invoice", data);
        String filename = String.format("INVOICE_%s.pdf", data.getInvoiceNo());
        try (FileOutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(filename)) {
            os.write(output);
        }
    }
}

Source Code

The source code is available on Github under various projects.

Spring Boot PDFfer