Ext.ux.Printer – printing for any ExtJS Component

July 28, 2009 51 Comments

After my recent foray into printing grids with ExtJS, I realised I needed to print some trees too. Seeing as some of the work was already done for the Grid example, it made sense to create a common API for printing any Ext.Component. And thus Ext.ux.Printer was born:

var grid = new Ext.grid.GridPanel({ // just a normal grid });
var tree = new Ext.tree.ColumnTree({ // just a normal column tree });

Ext.ux.Printer.print(grid);
Ext.ux.Printer.print(tree);

Each of the above opens a new window, renders some HTML (just a big table really), prints it and closes the window – all client side with no server side code required. Although trees and grids represent data quite differently internally, we can use the same API on Ext.ux.Printer to print them both.

Ext.ux.Printer uses Renderer classes to cope with a specific xtype, and adding Renderers for other components is easy. At the moment Ext.grid.GridPanel and Ext.tree.ColumnTree are supported out of the box, but let’s see how we’d add support for printing the contents of an Ext.Panel:

/**
 * Prints the contents of an Ext.Panel
 */
Ext.ux.Printer.PanelRenderer = Ext.extend(Ext.ux.Printer.BaseRenderer, {

 /**
  * Generates the HTML fragment that will be rendered inside the <html> element of the printing window
  */
 generateBody: function(panel) {
   return String.format("<div class='x-panel-print'>{0}</div>", panel.body.dom.innerHTML);
 }
});

Ext.ux.Printer.registerRenderer("panel", Ext.ux.Printer.PanelRenderer);

This is probably the simplest print renderer of all – we’re simply grabbing the HTML from inside a the panel’s body and returning it inside our own div. We subclassed Ext.ux.Printer.BaseRenderer, and in this case all we needed to do was provide an implementation for generateBody. Whatever this function returns is rendered inside the <body> tag of the newly-opened printing window.

Notice that we registered this renderer for all components with the xtype of ‘panel’. Internally, Ext.ux.Printer examines the xtype chain of the component you pass it to print, and uses the first renderer that matches. As many Ext components inherit from Ext.Panel this can function as a catch-all renderer.

Here’s how we’d use our new renderer:

var panel = new Ext.Panel({
  html: {
    tag: 'ul',
    chidren: [
      {tag: 'li', text: 'Item 1'},
      {tag: 'li', text: 'Item 2'},
      {tag: 'li', text: 'Item 3'}
    ]
  }
});

Ext.ux.Printer.print(panel);

Pretty straightforward. You can now print Ext.Panels the same way you’d print a Grid or a Tree. Take a look at the Grid Renderer and the ColumnTree Renderer for examples of rendering more advanced components.

As usual, all of the Ext.ux.Printer source is available on Github, and the README file there contains instructions for installation and usage.

Finally, when the printing window is opened it includes a stylesheet that it expects to find at “/stylesheets/print.css”. There is a default print.css stylesheet included with the extension to get you started, and you can specify where to find this stylesheet like this:

Ext.ux.Printer.BaseRenderer.prototype.stylesheetPath = '/path/to/print/stylesheet.css';

Filed under extjs Tagged with , , , , ,

Printing grids with Ext JS

July 26, 2009 60 Comments

Grids are one of the most widely used components in Ext JS, and often represent data that the user would like to print. As the grid is usually part of a wider application, simply printing the page isn’t often a good solution.

You could attach a stylesheet with media=”print”, which hides all of the other items on the page, though this is rather application-specific, and a pain to update. It would be far better to have a reusable way of printing the data from any grid.

The way I went about this was to open up a new window, build a table containing the grid data into the new window, then print it and close. It’s actually pretty simple, and with a bit of CSS we can even get the printable view looking like it does in the grid.

Here’s how you use it (this is a slightly modified version of the Array Grid Example):

var grid = new Ext.grid.GridPanel({
  store  : store,
  columns: [
      {header: &quot;Company&quot;,      width: 160, dataIndex: 'company'},
      {header: &quot;Price&quot;,        width: 75,  dataIndex: 'price', renderer: 'usMoney'},
      {header: &quot;Change&quot;,       width: 75,  dataIndex: 'change'},
      {header: &quot;% Change&quot;,     width: 75,  dataIndex: 'pctChange'}
      {header: &quot;Last Updated&quot;, width: 85,  dataIndex: 'lastChange', renderer: Ext.util.Format.dateRenderer('m/d/Y')}
  ],
  title:'Array Grid',
  tbar : [
    {
      text   : 'Print',
      iconCls: 'print',
      handler: function() {
        Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print(grid);
      }
    }
  ]
});

So we’ve just set up a simple grid with a print button in the top toolbar. The button just calls Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print, which does all the rest. The full source code that this example was based upon can be found at http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/array-grid.js.

The source for the extension itself is pretty simple (download it here):

If you look at the source above you’ll see it includes a ‘print.css’ stylesheet, which can be used to style the printable markup. The GridPrinter expects this stylesheet to be available at /stylesheets/print.css, but this is easy to change:

  //add this before you call Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print
  Ext.ux.GridPrinter.stylesheetPath = '/some/other/path/gridPrint.css';

Finally, here is some CSS I’ve used to achieve a grid-like display on the printable page:

html,body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,p,blockquote,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;}
img,body,html{border:0;}
address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;}
ol,ul {list-style:none;}caption,th {text-align:left;}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:100%;}q:before,q:after{content:'';}

table {
  width: 100%;
  text-align: left;
  font-size: 11px;
  font-family: arial;
  border-collapse: collapse;
}

table th {
  padding: 4px 3px 4px 5px;
  border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
  border-left-color: #eee;
  background-color: #ededed;
}

table td {
  padding: 4px 3px 4px 5px;
  border-style: none solid solid;
  border-width: 1px;
  border-color: #ededed;
}

This technique could easily be adapted to print any component that uses a store – DataViews, ComboBoxes, Charts – whatever. It just requires changing the generated markup and stylesheet.

Filed under extjs Tagged with , , ,

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