Define a time limit in Node with Bent

In this guide, we'll show you how you can set a conversion time limit at PDFShift. This will allow you to define a maximum time for the conversion process to complete, and if the process takes longer than the defined time, the conversion will be aborted.

In some cases, this can be useful if you want the request to not be too long and then handle failure on your end depending on the result.

To do so, we use the timeout property, which is the maximum time in seconds that the request is allowed to take. If the request takes longer than the defined time, the conversion will be aborted.

const bent = require('bent')
const fs = require('fs');

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
api_key = 'sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx'

params = {
    source: 'https://www.example.com',
    timeout: 10
}

const post = bent('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf', 'POST', 'json', 200);
const response = await post('', params, {Authorization: 'Basic ' + Buffer.from('api:' + apiKey).toString('base64')});

if (response.status >= 400) {
    throw new Error(`Request failed with status code ${response.status}: ${response.data}`);
}

const getBuffer = bent('buffer')
fs.writeFileSync('result.pdf', await getBuffer(response));

console.log('The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf');

In the above example, the conversion could fail if the conversion takes longer than 10 seconds.

For further details on the timeout property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.

We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.