Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Download a PDF file in Playwright instead of opening it in a new tab when clicking on its link

Post

Download a PDF file in Playwright instead of opening it in a new tab when clicking on its link

−0

My organisation uses Moodle as their online e-learning system on which teachers share resources, and oftentimes numerous documents that we need to view/download are posted there. The default way of attaching documents (which is what everyone ends up using) requires the recipient to ctrl-click on the link, move to the tab just opened and ctrl+S for every PDF shared, which isn't exactly a 'git clone-experience'.

To get over this I tried using Playwright, famous for being able to automatically perform practically any useful action a human would, but everything I've tried has always caused a download promise to hang after the PDF opened in a new tab.

posted 3 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

3mo ago

Elefy‭

31 reputation 2 2 4 6

Raw

Markdown

History

1 comment thread

I appreciate the self-answer, but this question isn't easily answerable by any other users. In your q... (2 comments)

ggorlen‭ wrote 3 months ago · edited 3 months ago

copy link

I appreciate the self-answer, but this question isn't easily answerable by any other users. In your questions and answers, I don't see any URLs, so it's not even clear to me what page you're automating or how I could begin to reproduce the issue.

"everything I've tried has always caused a download promise to hang after the PDF opened in a new tab" -- can you share the non-working code?

Please provide enough context that someone besides you could provide an answer. Without that, I'm dubious whether this thread will provide value to the community beyond you. Thanks.

Elefy‭ wrote 2 months ago

copy link

Hi ggorlen‭, the main reason for this answer was simply to say 'use headless mode to force a download of the PDF', but you're right about the example not being very useful (I couldn't really share it unfortunately as it involved logging into an intranet).

If I find myself using this again for publicly-available content, I'd be more than happy to show how I did that, in a way easy to reproduce.

Communities

Comments on Download a PDF file in Playwright instead of opening it in a new tab when clicking on its link

Download a PDF file in Playwright instead of opening it in a new tab when clicking on its link

1 comment thread