Hybiscus is a cloud based service for building PDF reports using pre-designed components that look impressive without any effort. Simply define the content using a simple JSON schema and get a PDF in a matter of seconds.

---

🌺 Hybiscus SDK (NodeJS)

NodeJS SDK for interacting with the Hybiscus API

---

⚠️ Breaking changes in v1

The v1 release of this library contains breaking changes from the v0.X version. The most major change is the shift from camelCase for the variable naming inside the options for Reports and Components, to snake_case, which closely aligns with the API variable naming style. This means the documentation on Hybiscus Docs can be used directly with this library, without needing to know to convert between formats.

---

🪛 Requirements

• NodeJS 14.X or newer

🛠 Installation

The library can be installed via npm as follows:

$   npm install @hybiscus/web-api

🚀 Usage

The NodeJS SDK provides a declarative API for building up the report and the components inside it. Below is a simple example to get you started:

Note To use the Hybiscus API, you will require an API key which you can get by signing up at https://hybiscus.dev/signup for a Free trial. For more details of the plans on offer, see here.

Quick start

import {
    HybiscusClient,
    Report,
    Components
} from "@hybiscus/web-api";
const { Core } = Components;
const { Section, Table, Row } = Core;


const section = new Section({ section_title: "title" }).addComponents([
    new Row({ width: "2/3" }),
    new Row({ width: "2/3" }).addComponents([
        new Table({
            title: "Table title",
            headings: ["URL", "Page views"],
            rows: [
                ["google.com", "500"],
                ["bing.com", "50"],
            ]
        }),
    ]),
]);
const report = new Report({
    report_title: "Report title",
    report_byline: "The byline" 
}).addComponent(section);

const client = new HybiscusClient(process.env.HYBISCUS_API_KEY);
try {
    const response = await client.buildReport({ report });
    console.log(response);
} catch (error) {
    console.error(error);   
}

The Promise returned by client.buildReport resolves to an object, which contains the URL for the generated PDF. The object is defined by the following interface:

interface IPDFReport {
    url: string | null;
    taskID: string | null;
    status: "SUCCESS" | "FAILED" | "RUNNING" | "QUEUED";
    errorMessage: string | null;
}

Components

Classes are available for each of the components in the Hybiscus API. All component classes follow the same basic principle, initialise the component class using the options that are specified in the API docs. The only difference with the TypeScript / NodeJS library is that instead of using snake_case formatting for the names, the names are changed to camelCase.

Note As of v1.x, the variable naming format is maintained as snake_case in line with the API format.

Components which are specified as extendable in the API docs, have the optional method .addComponents or .addComponent, which you can use to add components within them. Components can be deeply nested through this way, giving a lot flexibility.

import { Components } from "@hybiscus/web-api";
const { Core } = Components;
const { Section, Text } = Components;

const section = new Section({ section_title: "title" })
    .addComponents([
        new Section({ section_title: "Sub-section" })
            .addComponents([
                new Text({ text: "Example text" }),
                new Text({ text: "More example text" }),
            ]);
        new Section({ section_title: "Sub-section" })
            .addComponents([
                new Text({ text: "Example text" }),
                new Text({ text: "More example text" }),
            ]);
    ])

This forms part of the declarative API, which lets you define the report contents without worrying about layout and design, and focusing on content.

Client

The client HybiscusClient is initialised with your API token. Two functions are available which correspond to the 2 API endpoints:

• Build report (.buildReport)
• Preview report (.previewReport)

The .previewReport function generates a low resolution JPEG preview of the report, which doesn't count against your monthly quota.

Both functions accept either an instance of the Report class for the report parameter, or an object in the reportSchema parameter, which has the report defined according to the API documentation online.

import { HybiscusClient } from "@hybiscus/web-api";

...

const client = new HybiscusClient(process.env.HYBISCUS_API_KEY);

try { 
    const response = await client.previewReport({ report });
    console.log(response);
} catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
}

Using a custom HTTP client

By default Hybiscus will use native fetch, falling back to cross-fetch if no native implementation is available. You can use an alternative fetch implementation by passing an instance of it as the second argument of the HybiscusClient constructor. This client must support the Fetch API.

import nodeFetch from "node-fetch";

const client = new HybiscusClient(process.env.HYBISCUS_API_KEY, nodeFetch);

📖 Documentation

Documentation can be autogenerated using jsdoc by running npm run doc. This will generate HTML documentation in the docs/ folder which can be viewed directly in a browser without the need for a web server.

---

© 2022, Hybiscus