Meteor: Dynamic pdf generation with pdfKit and FlowRouter

Question

I'm using pdfKit and FlowRouter on my meteor App. I would like to generate a pdf file without saving it an the server. In the docs there is an example for that:

Router.route('/getPDF', function() {
 var doc = new PDFDocument({size: 'A4', margin: 50});
 doc.fontSize(12);
 doc.text('PDFKit is simple', 10, 30, {align: 'center', width: 200});
 this.response.writeHead(200, {
 'Content-type': 'application/pdf',
 'Content-Disposition': "attachment; filename=test.pdf"
 });
 this.response.end( doc.outputSync() );
 }, {where: 'server'});

But this is for Iron Router usage. As I'm using FlowRouter, I don't know how to display/download the pdf directly to the user without saving the file on the server.

Answer 1

Use the server side router from meteorhacks picker. Then something along the lines of

Picker.route('/generate/getPdf', function(params, req, res, next) {
    var doc = new PDFDocument({size: 'A4', margin: 50});
    doc.fontSize(12);
    doc.text('PDFKit is simple', 10, 30, {align: 'center', width: 200});
    res.writeHead(200, {
        'Content-Type': 'application/pdf',
        'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename=test.pdf'
    });
    res.end(doc.outputSync());
});

UPDATE: now that outputSync is deprecated, use:

Picker.route('/generate/getPdf', function(params, req, res, next) {
    var doc = new PDFDocument({size: 'A4', margin: 50});
    doc.fontSize(12);
    doc.text('PDFKit is simple', 10, 30, {align: 'center', width: 200});
    res.writeHead(200, {
        'Content-Type': 'application/pdf',
        'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename=test.pdf'
    });
    doc.pipe(res);
    doc.end();
});