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Ruby

Posted by Bryan Jenkins
Bryan Jenkins
5,438 Points

Rails PDF or Document Generation

I'm looking for a way to pre-populate documents and have them signed by clients. I won't have all the information when the document is sent so I'll need a way to collect and store the information they add. Has anyone faced a similar challenge? What tools would you recommend?

3 Answers

Nick Fuller
Nick Fuller
9,027 Points

Hi Bryan,

I'm not sure what you're doing but I would look at your workflow and see if perhaps it would be possible to make some adjustments. For instance, instead of generating a PDF/Document and then sending it to a client and having them edit it and sending it back, why not give them a login to your site and have them make additions directly into the database? Then once you have all the required information, you can generate a final PDF/Document and send that over.

Again I'm not familiar with what you're doing or the requirements that go with it, but this seems like it would save you a lot of trouble.

Bryan Jenkins
Bryan Jenkins
5,438 Points
Bryan Jenkins
Bryan Jenkins
5,438 Points

That's a great idea!

Some of the information I'm collecting is sensitive so would heroku be my best bet for deployment?

Also, any recommendations for the PDF generation? Or maybe an alternative?

Thanks!

Nick Fuller
Nick Fuller
9,027 Points
Nick Fuller
Nick Fuller
9,027 Points

Whenever you're dealing with sensitive material, such as a user login or shopping cart, you're going to want to setup an SSL certificate. There are many providers including Verasign, Comodo (treehouse uses a 128 bit comodo SSL certificate), geo trust and many more. An SSL certificate basically encrypts the data from the user's computer and sends it to the server. any information from the server is also encrypted and sent back to the user.

You can set this up on heroku, however this is where heroku as a service starts to get really expensive.

As for PDF generation there are some nice tools out there

  1. Prawn
  2. WIcked