Waiting for a custom element to be ready in C# with HttpClient

In this guide, we'll show you how to wait for a custom element to be ready when converting HTML to PDF using C# and the HttpClient library.

When converting HTML containing dynamic content, you might need to wait for specific elements to be rendered before generating the PDF.

using System;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
var apiKey = "sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx";

var client = new HttpClient();
client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("X-API-Key", apiKey);

var payload = new
{
    source = "https://www.example.com",
    // Wait for a specific element to be ready
    wait_for = "#dynamic-content.loaded"
};

var json = System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize(payload);
var content = new StringContent(json, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");

var response = await client.PostAsync("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf", content);

// Handle errors:
if (response.StatusCode >= System.Net.HttpStatusCode.BadRequest)
{
    throw new Exception($"Request failed with status code {response.StatusCode}");
}

var result = await response.Content.ReadAsByteArrayAsync();

System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes("result.pdf", result);

Console.WriteLine("The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf");

This allows you to ensure dynamic content is fully loaded before PDF generation.

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.