Ticket PDFs in Spring Boot

Why tickets become PDFs

A ticket has to work at a gate with no signal, on a phone that may be offline, or on paper. Anything requiring a live request fails at exactly the wrong moment. That is the difference between a document and a view of a database, and it is why event organisers and travel operators keep asking for this.

What a ticket has to carry

Before any of the code below matters, the template has to produce a document that is actually a ticket. These are the fields that make it one, and the ones a reader or an auditor will look for first.

• the scannable code, which is the ticket; everything else is decoration
• the event or journey, with date and time including timezone
• the seat, zone or class where the entitlement is specific
• the holder name where the ticket is non-transferable
• the terms of entry, which are what a gate refusal is justified by

Turning your Thymeleaf template into a document

You already have the markup. TemplateEngine.process("invoice", context) gives you it as a string, which is the only input the render needs. Thymeleaf's @{...} link syntax resolves against the servlet context path. In a rendered document that context does not exist, so build absolute URLs or inline the CSS.

The Spring Boot implementation

java.net.http.HttpClient ships with the runtime, so this adds no dependency. The render happens in a controller returning StreamingResponseBody, and you return ResponseEntity<StreamingResponseBody>.

// TicketPdfController.java
package com.example.tickets;

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;
import java.time.Duration;

@RestController
public class TicketPdfController {

  private final HttpClient http = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
  private final TemplateEngine templates;

  @Value("${pdfpipe.key}")
  private String apiKey;

  @GetMapping(value = "/tickets/{id}.pdf", produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_PDF_VALUE)
  public ResponseEntity<StreamingResponseBody> pdf(@PathVariable String id) throws Exception {
    Context context = new Context();
    context.setVariable("ticket", ticketService.find(id));
    String html = templates.process("ticket", context);

    String body = new ObjectMapper().writeValueAsString(Map.of(
        "html", html,
        "options", Map.of("format", "A4", "printBackground", true)));

    HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder(URI.create("https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf"))
        .header("Authorization", "Bearer " + apiKey)
        .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
        .timeout(Duration.ofSeconds(60))
        .POST(HttpRequest.BodyPublishers.ofString(body))
        .build();

    // ofInputStream, not ofByteArray. A long ticket on the heap is how a
    // container sized for JSON payloads meets the garbage collector.
    HttpResponse<InputStream> upstream =
        http.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofInputStream());

    return ResponseEntity.ok()
        .header("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"ticket-" + id + ".pdf\"")
        .body(out -> upstream.body().transferTo(out));
  }
}

The CSS that makes a ticket page correctly

The layout problem specific to this document is that a barcode or QR code must render at a size and contrast a scanner can actually read after printing. These rules handle it.

/* The code has to survive printing. Keep it black on white at a
   size a scanner can resolve, and never let it break across a page. */
.barcode {
  break-inside: avoid;
  image-rendering: pixelated;
  min-width: 45mm;
  filter: none;
}

@page { size: A6 landscape; margin: 5mm; }

What goes wrong in Spring Boot

RestTemplate returning byte[] materialises the whole document on the heap, and a servlet container sized for JSON will meet the garbage collector after a handful of concurrent report renders. Use the reactive client or the JDK client with ofInputStream.

What people try first

Most Spring Boot projects reach for Flying Saucer, which renders XHTML strictly and rejects markup a browser would accept, or iText, whose AGPL licence makes commercial use a paid decision. That works until it is running on more than one machine, at which point the browser becomes the thing you operate rather than the thing you use.

Where the ticket lives afterwards

Rendering is the short part. A ticket is worthless the moment the event ends, so nothing needs to survive it except the record that it was scanned. That record lives in your database, not in the PDF.

Getting the document right

• Check the code itself. A ticket that will not scan is worthless no matter how it looks.
• Generation is triggered by a booking being confirmed, so size the timeout for that path rather than for a health check.
• Volume arrives in bursts, so queue the render rather than doing it inside the request that triggered it.
• Backgrounds are painted by default here, so a design that uses colour needs nothing set. Only an explicit print_background of false turns them off.

Frequently asked

Related

Other Spring Boot documents, and the same ticket in other stacks.