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

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 Java.net 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.*;
import java.io.*;

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

URL url = new URL("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestMethod("POST");
connection.setRequestProperty("X-API-Key", apiKey);
connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");
connection.setDoOutput(true);

String payload = "{\n" +
    "  \"source\": \"https://www.example.com\",\n" +
    "  \"wait_for\": \"#dynamic-content.loaded\"\n" +
    "}";

try (OutputStream os = connection.getOutputStream()) {
    byte[] input = payload.getBytes("utf-8");
    os.write(input, 0, input.length);
}

int responseCode = connection.getResponseCode();

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

InputStream inputStream = connection.getInputStream();
FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream("result.pdf");
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
int bytesRead;
while ((bytesRead = inputStream.read(buffer)) != -1) {
    outputStream.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
}
outputStream.close();
inputStream.close();

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.