asked on October 14, 2020
Hi there,
We are currently using Flexmonster in our solution as a front end reporting solution that gives our customers the flexibility to design their own custom reports and save them for later viewing. We have had a number of customers request the ability to have these reports scheduled for email delivery in Excel or PDF format.
To do that we would need to be able run the reports from a backend service but currently it doesn't appear to be possible from to run flexmonster without the frontend pivot grid.
Can I put forward a feature request to have the ability to generate a csv or pdf output from a C# api based on a report definition json and dataset that I could then deliver to our customers via email on a monthly or weekly basis through a backend service.
⋅ October 14, 2020
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us.
Our team wants to inform you that the recommended way to export from the backend is running Flexmonster in a headless browser.
For example, you can use Puppeteer — a JavaScript library for working with headless browsers.
We prepared a sample GitHub project with Flexmonster and Puppeteer. It demonstrates how to export Flexmonster reports in headless browsers with Puppeteer.
More details about the described approach can be found in our documentation.
In case using JavaScript library is not a suitable variant for your C# backend, we suggest checking out the Puppeteer Sharp, which is a .NET port of the official Node.JS Puppeteer API.
You are welcome to use the mentioned GitHub sample as a reference while implementing your own C# based implementation.
Please let us know if it helps.
Do not hesitate to contact us in case further questions arise.
Kind regards,
Illia
⋅ October 15, 2020
Thank you Illia, this seems like a workable solution.
Regards,
Aaron
