Rendering a PDF from data received via an API in Django

Django handles files received from APIs or external sources, such as PDFs, images, or documents.

It can involve processing, saving, or rendering files for further use or display within your application.

Steps for Rendering and Serving a PDF

Step 1: Fetch and Process Data

When an API provides a PDF file (often in binary format or as a URL to download), you’d handle this within a Django view or a dedicated function to retrieve and process the data.

Step 2: Render the PDF in Django

Django itself doesn’t directly display PDFs; instead, you typically render it using a library like ReportLab or WeasyPrint to create or process PDFs.

In this case:

Use Django views to serve PDFs directly as downloadable files or embed them within a web page. Save the PDF temporarily or permanently, depending on your requirements. How to display the PDF permanently or temporarily?

Step 3: Return the PDF Response

You’d use Django’s HttpResponse with content_type=’application/pdf’ to serve the file for download or display.

Example Flow in Django

import requests
from django.http import HttpResponse

def fetch_and_serve_pdf(request):
    # Fetch the PDF data from the API
    pdf_url = "https://example.com/api/pdf"
    response = requests.get(pdf_url)

    # Assuming the response is in binary content, serve it as a PDF
    if response.status_code == 200:
        pdf_content = response.content
        return HttpResponse(pdf_content, content_type='application/pdf')
    else:
        return HttpResponse("Failed to retrieve PDF", status=404)

In summary, PDF handling usually fits under Advanced Topics in Django due to the need for additional libraries and specific content handling within Django views or background tasks.