How to send dynamically created PDF as attachment with Amazon SES on Node JS

balavishnuvj — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 17:46:37 +0000

To send an email with dynamically created PDF as an attachment. There are two steps.

Step 1: Dynamically create a pdf
Step 2: Send this pdf as an attachment

Libraries used.

npm install aws-sdk ejs nodemailer html-pdf

Why do we need all these libraries?

aws-sdk is used for sending the email.
nodemailer is used to create an email with an attachment.
ejs is the templating engine used for create dynamic HTML.
html-pdf is used to convert HTML to pdf.

Step 1: Dynamically create a pdf

Let us create a template for html.

<!-- template.ejs --!>

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
  <head>
    <title>My Table</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Table</h1>
    <table style="width: 100%;">
      <tr>
        <th>Qty.</th>
        <th>Unit Price</th>
        <th>Total Cost</th>
      </tr>
      <% if (products.length) { %>
      <tr>
        <% products.forEach(function (product) { %>
        <td id="quantity"><%= product.quantity %></td>
        <td id="unitPrice"><%= product.unitPrice %></td>
        <td id="totalPrice"><%= product.totalPrice %></td>
        <% }) %>
      </tr>
      <% } %>
    </table>
  </body>
</html>

Now let's use this template to generate the HTML. I'm not writing the file to disk. Instead, keep the file in memory and pass it on.

import ejs from 'ejs';
import htmlPdf from 'html-pdf';

export async function htmlToPdfBuffer(pathname, params) {
  const html = await ejs.renderFile(pathname, params);
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    htmlPdf.create(html).toBuffer((err, buffer) => {
      if (err) {
        reject(err);
      } else {
        resolve(buffer);
      }
    });
  });
}

Usage would be like

const fileBuffer = await htmlToPdfBuffer('template.ejs', {
  products: [{ quantity: 2, unitPrice: 10, totalPrice: 20 }]
});

Now, fileBuffer is the dynamic pdf file which has to be sent. You could use toFile method of html-pdf to write this to disk.

Step 2: Send this pdf as an attachment

We could use aws-sdk directly for attachments. You would have to do MIME encoding manually, which is a bit tedious.

export function sendEmailWithAttachments(
  subject,
  html,
  toAddresses,
  attachments
) {
  const ses = new AWS.SES();
  const transporter = nodemailer.createTransport({
    SES: ses
  });
  const mailOptions = {
    from: "from@example.com",
    subject,
    html,
    to: toAddresses,
    attachments
  };
  transporter.sendMail(mailOptions, (err, data) => {

  });
}

Final usage

const fileBuffer = await htmlToPdfBuffer("template.ejs", {
  products: [{ quantity: 2, unitPrice: 10, totalPrice: 20 }]
});

sendEmailWithAttachments(
  "This is test subject",
  "<p>This email contails attachment</p>",
  ["to@example.com"],
  { filename: "attachment.pdf", content: fileBuffer }
);

DEV Community: balavishnuvj

How to send dynamically created PDF as attachment with Amazon SES on Node JS

Libraries used.

Step 1: Dynamically create a pdf

Step 2: Send this pdf as an attachment

Final usage