Multiple-page print or Reporting library for Vaadin 7 UI

Question

We had a Vaadin 7 UI page with multiple Layouts, Panels, and Chart (the Browser will come with ScrollBar as height is big). When we try to print using JavaScript in Vaadin code or using Ctrl+P of browser, it prints only One page in Firefox 32.0.3; prints multiple pages with only data for First Page in IE 8.

• We tried with specifying undefined size for all components in UI page (as mentioned in https://vaadin.com/forum#!/thread/3869543/7861633)
• We also tried with some CSS changes for print (as mentioned in https://vaadin.com/forum/#!/thread/529738/539201)

Both above cases didnot solved our problem. As we can understand from documentation that Vaadin scrolling uses a DOM structure, it was unusual to know such a tool does not provide proper Print option.

To brief our objective, we are looking at Reporting option in Vaadin for some data analysis. We saw some options (using JasperReport etc.) mentioned in StackOverflow, however will not be able to implement them as we need to deploy this application to Google App Engine (GAE) which has unsupported functions such as FileOutputStream etc.

To conclude, these are our issues -

1. How to resolve multiple page print issue in Vaadin 7?
2. If we are not able to solve first issue, What is the best Reporting library (for PDF or PNG or HTML or Print) that is supported by both Vaadin 7 and GAE?

Any guidelines or suggestions to direct us would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Printing HTML pages is random at best.

Every browser has it's own rules for display and page breaks. We always use pdf for things to print.

iReport / Jasperreports is the thing we use most of the time