Waiting for a custom element to be ready in Java 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 Java 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.

import java.net.http.*;
import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest.BodyPublishers;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse.BodyHandlers;
import java.time.Duration;

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

HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
    .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(10))
    .build();

HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
    .uri(URI.create("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf"))
    .header("X-API-Key", apiKey)
    .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
    .POST(BodyPublishers.ofString("{\n" +
        "  \"source\": \"https://www.example.com\",\n" +
        "  \"wait_for\": \"#dynamic-content.loaded\"\n" +
        "}"))
    .build();

HttpResponse<byte[]> response = client.send(request, BodyHandlers.ofByteArray());

// Handle errors:
if (response.statusCode() >= 400) {
    throw new RuntimeException("Request failed with status code " + response.statusCode());
}

java.nio.file.Files.write(java.nio.file.Paths.get("result.pdf"), response.body());

System.out.println("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.