CMS Controls for Online Catalog Print Output
Greetings,
GOAL:
To use the SiteFinity for online content management AND migration via PDF export for printing applications - resulting in one control system for managing our online and print catalog content.
I am an end user client of the SiteFinity system using SiteFinity for our website CMS including our online product catalog. We also use a PDF converter for delivering individual product PDF files on request from product page online.
Sample
We have been working with several developers in creating our backend tool that allows us to define print ranges (including our entire product catalog content) to be exported to PDF for printing purposes. However, it seems impossible to control page formatting and styling when exporting out to PDF for print applications.
I would like to ask if anyone else is successful in migrating your online content to a printed page environment while successfully controlling page structure and styling such as page breaks, tables, font controls, etc?
Thank you.
Brent Gaspard
Hello Brent Gaspard,
We do not have such out-of-the-box feature, except for Form Responses. However, there are a lot of third-party modules for this that should be working with Sitefinity.
What exactly is the problem that you are experiencing with your custom implementation? You said "However, it seems impossible to control page formatting and styling when exporting out to PDF for print applications.". Can you specify a little more on that?
Svetoslav Petsov,
Thank you for jumping in on this topic - it is VERY important to our effort to use SiteFinity successfully. We have used third party developers to create an online catalog using the SiteFinity CMS. Though our webpages flow well, we continue to have page flow issues when producing PDF exports for printing purposes.
Please see the attachments I have included for reference.
Our primary issues are related to page flow, objects spanning page breaks, and table design and controls.
I would REALLY like to find someone using SiteFinity and ANY third party applications for doing a better job of presenting catalog content on pages with better structure and flow.
Any guidance will be appreciated.
Thank you,
Brent Gaspard
Hey Brent,
I've had success in the past with feeding the HTML into a RadEditor (in code obviously) then just calling it's export to pdf function.
...and it'd be free
Steve
Hmmm ... interesting. I LLLLLLLOVE the RadControls in Telerik. I wish my developer would have implemented more of them - I think we created a lot of tools from scratch that appear ready made from the RadControl Panel.
I wonder if you might offer samples of how you are using your suggested process? Have you looked at the samples I attached?
This is SO critical for us. I would really like to study your solution closer.
Thank you Steve — and Merry Christmas.
Hello,
Can you check the following demo of RadEditor?:
http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/editor/examples/pdfexport/defaultcs.aspx
What you can do is get the html between the rendered html of the page (only the one between the <body> tag, as RadEditor does not support <html>, <head>, <body> tags), pass it to the Editor and then export this to pdf.