Outputting pdfs with google app engine

It's child easy, but not googleable yet. I used reportlab - a handy, pure-python pdf library. Here are the steps:

1. Checkout reportlab into your app directory

   svn co http://www.reportlab.co.uk/svn/public/reportlab/trunk \
   reportlab

2. Write some pdf-generation code, like

   import wsgiref.handlers
   
   from google.appengine.ext import webapp
   
   from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
   
   
   class MainPage(webapp.RequestHandler):
   
       def get(self):
           self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/pdf'
           p = canvas.Canvas(self.response.out)
           p.drawString(100, 750, "Hey, it's easy!.")
   
           p.showPage()
           p.save()
   
   
   
   def main():
       application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/', MainPage)], debug=True)
       wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       main()
   

   The key is the canvas instantiation. The constructor takes a file-like object and writes into it. You might have noticed that the code is heavily inspired by this tutorial. The only difference is the creation of canvas.
3. That's it. See? I said it was easy. You can run the dev_appserver or upload it to Google in order to see the results.