Iām not sure if youāve come across the need to link within a pdf but I have.
My pdf report is over 70 pages due to the nature of the site, and as the report goes out to multiple people I have an index page at the front of my pdf. What I would like to do is on the index page have the pdf generated with links, so they user can click on page 35 and be taken to that page. The other thing is Iād also like to have hyperlinks to email addresses and our website within the pdf. This is as our reports go out to our clients. If any one has done anything similar Iād love to hear about it.
Also I have submitted this as a feature request should anyone else be interested in this.
You completely nerd-sniped me with this topic - I definitely shouldnāt have spent as much time on this as I did. But, this is actually possible with the existing reporting module. Weāll definitely have to see about adding this capability in a better way.
Basically, the workaround I came up with relies on the fact that objects in reporting can be copied to the clipboard and show up as XML representations of the underlying Java object. So, to use this (extremely janky) workaround:
0. Paste the script below into the script console and execute it. Nothing will happen - thatās intentional.
Copy the desired component (Iāve only really tested text shapes) to the clipboard.
Go back to the script console, and in the interactive interpreter, run addURLToClipboardObject(<someURL>). To link to a specific page, use addURLToClipboardObject("Page:3"). You can also use Page:Next and Page:Back.
Click back to the reporting workspace, and specifically click into the editor/visible page. Then paste your modified object.
If everything went correctly, the hyperlink should be active on the preview tab:
And, without further ado, the hacky monstrosity that will do all this. Itās pretty unlikely this will break any existing report, but it may throw all kinds of errors into the console. I would recommend copying your report to a new project, going through this process to add the links, and once youāve verified it works copy the report back to your original project.
def addURLToClipboardObject(url):
from java.awt import Toolkit
from java.awt.datatransfer import DataFlavor, Transferable
from java.io import ByteArrayInputStream
from java.lang import String
import re
class MockReportMillClipboard(Transferable):
RMDataFlavor = DataFlavor("application/reportmill", "ReportMill Shape Data")
def __init__(self, data):
self.data = String(data).getBytes()
def isDataFlavorSupported(self, flavor):
return flavor == self.RMDataFlavor
def getTransferData(self, flavor):
if flavor == self.RMDataFlavor:
return ByteArrayInputStream(self.data)
def getTransferDataFlavors(self):
return self.RMDataFlavor.getTransferDataFlavors()
clip = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard()
dataflavor = None
for df in clip.getAvailableDataFlavors():
if df.mimeType == 'application/x-java-serialized-object; class=java.lang.String':
dataflavor = df
break
if dataflavor:
data = clip.getData(dataflavor)
regex = r"<text(.*)>"
subst = r'<text\g<1> url="%s">' % url
result = re.sub(regex, subst, data, re.MULTILINE)
print "Added URL to clipboard object"
clip.setContents(MockReportMillClipboard(result), None)
Thank you so much for spending time on this, I really do appreciate it. In fact its whatās so great about Ignition that we have this community. I will definitely give this a bash and let you know how I get along. Itās certainly going to make the reporting that much more powerful for us.
This worked like a charm in the report preview and in the report viewer window.
I then realised that my question was not as well defined as I thought, and I do apologise for this. You see the old reports were done in Microsoft Word with a table of contents, and when they were exported to PDF the table of contents was āclickableā. This is what I was after so that when the user generates the report then saved it and emailed it to the client the table of contents still had hyperlinks in it.
I have a button along side my report viewer, and once I use it to save to pdf, the links donāt work once the pdf is saved to the local computer and opened in the adobe pdf viewer.
Hmm, thatās interesting - when I was testing this I specifically tried saving the output and was still able to click the links.
EDIT: Looks like thereās a limitation - when the objects get copied to subsequent pages due to table wrapping, they donāt get clickable links in a PDF export, even though they do in the report viewer/preview. Unfortunately, I donāt know if thatās going to be solveable. I was able to put multiple clickable links onto the first page, which do come out clickable when opened using Chromeās built-in PDF viewer, so they should work in other PDF viewers.
Your document links are working in my Chrome browser as well, so its strange in acrobat its not working, maybe I have a setting somewhere that is causing this. I will play around more with this next week, please do excuse the disjointed responses, as our time zones are far apart. Iāll have more feedback for you next week.
Some great news, after playing with the reports a bit more your solution is working on adobe and chrome, I think I mustāve made a mistake somewhere when working between the links. I really canāt thank you enough for your assistance with this.
Iām trying to get this to run using āPage:2ā in the arguments but Iām getting the following error in the interpreter. Any ideas?
>>> addURLToClipboardObject(āPage:2ā)
Added URL to clipboard object
Traceback (most recent call last):
File āā, line 1, in
File āā, line 33, in addURLToClipboardObject
NotImplementedError: āMockReportMillClipboardā object does not implement abstract method āgetTransferDataFlavorsā from ājava.awt.datatransfer.Transferableā
Iāve just tried it again and now the error has changed to:
Added URL to clipboard object
Traceback (most recent call last):
File āā, line 1, in
File āā, line 36, in addURLToClipboardObject
File āā, line 21, in getTransferDataFlavors
AttributeError: ājava.awt.datatransfer.DataFlavorā object has no attribute āgetTransferDataFlavorsā
