When working with ReportLab, we briefly mentioned that we can create canvas or document templates using either a file name or an open Python file, or file-like, object. In our previous examples, we created a new file using a file name passed as a string to our ReportLab constructors. If we wanted, we could have opened a file manually and used it as a constructor argument:
f = open('products.pdf')
doc = SimpleDocTemplate(f)This is important because when working with Django views, we want to be able to return this PDF file after generating it from our database information. One idea is to generate the file on disk and redirect the user's browser to the newly create PDF. But this is a lot of extra effort and will require maintenance of the disk to prevent old report requests from using up our server's storage space.
A much
better alternative is to use ReportLab's support for file-like objects with our Django response object. Django views always return an instance of the HttpResponse...