I think these two websites would allow us to do pretty much everything I (and some others here as well) have been asking Bubble to do, without having you guys spend tons of hours developing it and me spending tons of money paying for it!
But I need some help creating the basic integration to get it to work.
Can Bubble or anyone help me out with that? Just show a very basic example and I will run with it.
I think this would also help the Bubble community tremendously. Basically showing that one can now create any merged document and create any report they want.
Don’t see why WebMerge wouldn’t work well. Will have a look and see how this would work and report back.
But why Jaspersoft ? It is all very last decade - not to say it isn’t powerful, but like many “cloud” BI solutions, it is generally large old fashioned “warehouse” companies who have stuck a piece of hideous looking UI on the front of their “enterprise” solution in an effort to tick a box.
What are you trying to produce ? Dashboard ? Reports ? Embeded ? Printed ?
We need to produce reports of case activit in each county of NY State. Sometimes the administrator just needs to know teach attorney or court caseload (Reports/dashboard/embeded), sometimes a specific report needs to be sent to State every quarter (printed).
Would love to hear what you have in mind. I thought JasperSoft would be pretty good solution.
I am no doubt being a bit harsh about JasperSoft. It is very powerful, but quite complex. I just wouldn’t know where to start with integrating it into anything I could get Bubble data to.
WebMerge on the other hand is very nice. Seem to be having a few issues with Bubble > Zapier at the moment. But will report back when I fix it.
I’m very interested in creating PDF documents. True that WebMerge seems to bring something I miss in bubble… but that’s expensive ! @macro101 A simplier tool for exporting PDF based on bubble’s page would not be enough for you ?
A cheaper and simpler tool… sure! Of course it would. What did you have in mind?
Currently, HTML to PDF is certainly “cheaper” for sure, but not “simpler”.
To create a nice PDF document from HTML, one has to have knowledge of HTML code. And it is time consuming.
Also, it is not as simple as just exporting Bubble PDF page. First, the page would have to load with the info and immediately be converted into a PDF. I don’t want the user to see the page and then click on a button to then create a PDF to then have to click on save again.
I have not found a way to have the page load with the data and be immediately converted to PDF.
Second, currently my attorney clients create their own Word document templates, where they add merge tags to create their runtime letters.
Nothing in mind. I don’t know such a tool, especially with Word/tags integration.
About PDF export, there were some talks with @Faiz for asking this feature…
Also I was more thinking about an action which could be run in backend triggering an API endpoint, so the user would not have to load data / generate report / save pdf himself.
Actually I really wonder how feasible this is. @Emmanuel, is it technically possible for you to general a PDF on your side from a web page, like it would have appeared in our browser ?
I actually tried again with HTML to pdf copy-pasting a random page with dynamic content and it works well ! (I remember I didn’t get anything last time - I should have been wrong somewhere). @macro101 does it responds to your need ?
However, in my case I can’t use it due to restricted access (Privacy rules I mean). Authentification would be needed. And I presume exported data are usually sensitive ones.
It only works by calling the page directly if you are on a free plan. It does not work if you are on a paid plan. You have to create a text field inside a page with html code in it and then pass this field as part of the API call to HTML to PDF Blockspring API.
I recently was able to achieve this, in a form. Blockspring is the answer, the converter: “HTML to PDF” specifically as @emmanuel said. Create an action to save data, then get data from the api (html to pdf) input the fields with dynamic content and your PDF is created. The real trick is coming up with a format, that you do need code for, otherwise the data is just converted as 1 big text box essentially with no format. At least you can achieve the conversion and saving the data, but once the data is saved no more calls from block spring it’ll be saved on your s3.amazon bubble account. But for $7 from Blockspring giving you 100k calls, you should be good! Reporting you can still achieve, you just need to do it manually and tell the front end what to show, how to show it and where to pull the data from.
I meant your Bubble plan. Not Blockspring @NicolasDap.
I was all excited because I didn’t initially had to write html code. I just sent the page address to blockspring and BAM, it created as PDF! Awesome.
The problem is that once you are on a paid plan with Bubble, your page no longer works due to security strings.
Well, it looks very similar to the service I was using for such purposes https://www.altopdf.com/ yet it has way less number of features to do with pdf’s. It’s just a conversion/merging/splitting/protecting/whatever tool does everything in pretty easy manner yet quite not impressive
