Waiting for a custom element to be ready in PHP with cURL

The wait_for parameter is one of the most powerful feature of PDFShift. It allows you to control when the document is ready to be converted to PDF.

For instance, you might need the wait_for parameter to wait on your charts to be visible.

It makes sense because from our engine point of view, all the resources are loaded so the conversion to PDF can be executed. But from your page stand point, even though everything is loaded, not everything is rendered!

So by using the wait_for parameter, you can tell PDFShift to wait for a specific condition to be true before allowing the conversion to happen.

That property expects a string which points to a global function.

For instance, if in your HTML page, you have the following script:

<script>
function isPageReady() {
    return document.getElementById('chart').clientHeight > 0;
}
</script>

You can set the wait_for parameter to isPageReady and PDFShift will wait for the isPageReady function to return true before converting the page to PDF.

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

$params = array (
    'source' => 'https://www.example.com',
    'wait_for' => 'isPageReady'
)

$curl = curl_init('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($params));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Authorization: Basic ' . base64_encode('api:' . $api_key)
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
if ($response === false) {
    $error_message = curl_error($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    throw new Exception("cURL error: $error_message");
}

// Get the HTTP status code
$http_status = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

// Close cURL resource
curl_close($curl);

// Check if the request was successful
if ($http_status !== 200) {
    throw new Exception("Request failed with HTTP status code: $http_status");
}

// Save the file to result.pdf
file_put_contents('result.pdf', $response);

echo 'The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf';

In case your page doesn't have the javascript function available, but you still need to wait on some elements to be rendered before continuing the conversion, you can add javascript code directly in the request and use it at the same time:

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

$params = array (
    'source' => 'https://www.example.com',
    'javascript' => 'let isFontReady = false; document.fonts.ready.then(() => isFontReady = true); function isPageReady() { return isFontReady; }',
    'wait_for' => 'isPageReady'
)

$curl = curl_init('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($params));
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
    'Content-Type: application/json',
    'Authorization: Basic ' . base64_encode('api:' . $api_key)
));

$response = curl_exec($curl);
if ($response === false) {
    $error_message = curl_error($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    throw new Exception("cURL error: $error_message");
}

// Get the HTTP status code
$http_status = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

// Close cURL resource
curl_close($curl);

// Check if the request was successful
if ($http_status !== 200) {
    throw new Exception("Request failed with HTTP status code: $http_status");
}

// Save the file to result.pdf
file_put_contents('result.pdf', $response);

echo 'The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf';

The above script will wait for all fonts to be ready before returning true for the isPageReady function. PDFShift will then wait for the fonts to be ready, via the isPageReady, before converting the page to PDF.

For further details on the wait_for 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.