Portable Document Format (PDF) files are some of the most commonly used file types across the web. In eCommerce, that also holds true. Whether it’s for invoices, product manuals, energy labels, or even promotional flyers, there is always a requirement to share them with customers.

When it comes to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), you might find that working with PDF files is not as well-documented as it could be. This blog aims to provide a high-level overview and cover the most important considerations for sharing PDF files with customers in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

File storage and access

Use cases and requirements will dictate where the files are stored and how they can be accessed.

File storage

Separation of responsibilities between complex systems is essential to ensure consistency across them.

In the case of invoices, it’s best to let the invoicing system generate the invoice files.
For product manuals or energy labels, the system that handles the catalog should expose the files to your system.
For promotion flyers, the marketing/content team should provide them.

In smaller systems, that might not be possible, so alternative solutions should be considered. If only storage is needed, SFCC’s library system, WebDAV or a separate file management service can provide that. If you also need to create the PDF files, they can be generated on-the-fly using libraries such as jsPDF (GitHub).

File access

If the document should/can be available to anyone on the internet, such as a general promotion flyer, loyalty program overview, or energy label, then a simple link to the required file should suffice.

Otherwise, file access should be restricted. This can be based on customer level, order level (e.g., invoice), order product line item level (e.g., product manual), or more generally, registered or ordering customer level. This means we cannot expose a direct link to the file but need to serve the file from the server-side.

Additional considerations

GDPR and local legislation might impact your solution, so it is important to anticipate this and ensure compliance when designing the solution.

Exposing the files

If you are storing the files in SFCC’s libraries, you can simply expose the URL to those files. This is very simple - just use the URLUtils class and its staticURL method, and specify the library context.

If, however, you went with a different solution, please continue reading.

It turns out you can expose files using both traditional controller endpoints and Salesforce Commerce API (SCAPI) custom endpoints! This means that it can be accessible to your customers regardless of whether or not you are using SFRA or a headless architecture.

Technically, the approach is very much the same. The only difference is the syntax and some limitations.

Limitations

Before you jump into coding, it is important to consider the file sizes you are working with. Whether using SCAPI custom endpoints or controller endpoints, Salesforce imposes a hard limit of 10 MB on the response size for this type of response. If any of your files exceed that limit, another approach should be used.

Another thing to consider is the average response time, especially if the files are being retrieved from a third-party API. If the third-party API is also generating the file on-demand or is slow in general, beware that:

SCAPI requests time out after 10 seconds.
Controller endpoints time out after 30 seconds.

Encoding

If you haven't worked with PDF files before, here's a major time-saver: encoding matters!

It is key to serving readable PDF files to the front-end. Based on past experience, the only encoding that worked was “iso-8859-1.”

You can implement it simply by setting the response’s content type as “application/pdf;charset=iso-8859-1”.

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