PDFCrowd gem causes deadlock while converting URL to PDF

I'm using your Ruby On Rails gem and the following example code. I want to be able to convert a URL that exists on the same webserver and deliver it immediately to the user's web browser.



def generatePdf
begin
# create an API client instance
client = Pdfcrowd::Client.new("username", "key")

# convert a web page and store the generated PDF to a variable
pdf = client.convertURI("http://mywebsite/url/to/convert")

# send the generated PDF
send_data(pdf,
:filename => "google_com.pdf",
:type => "application/pdf",
:disposition => "attachment")
rescue Pdfcrowd::Error => why
render :text => why
end
end

The problem is if I specify my own website as the url it causes what appears to be a deadlock. The web server appears to be waiting for the pdfcrowd service to access the url to convert it to a pdf, but the web server is already waiting because it is in the middle of a request already.

I've found a workaround for this by calling this code within an aysnchronous process using the sucker_punch gem. However, this is really ugly, as I don't know when it is finished, and have resorted to using a timer in javascript to make the second call to download the PDF.

The strange thing is the code above works sometimes in production (Rails 4.02/Apache/Passenger) but other times it will just hang. In development on Webbrick server it always hangs.

Is there a way I can elegantly run this code and serve up a PDF file without having to resort to using asynchronous processing such as sucker_punch or delayed_job?

Hello,

You can a "pdf" variable to the URL

http://mywebsite/url/to/convert?pdf=1

If pdf=1, your application will call the API with http://mywebsite/url/to/convert?pdf=0
If pdf=0, your application will render the page content