How do I get page breaks to work in Visualforce without rendering as PDF?

Question

I have a Visualforce page that I need to be paginated. I followed the guide at http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Creating_Professional_PDF_Documents_with_CSS_and_Visualforce and have verified that it generates the proper HTML. However, I cannot render the page as PDF because it references web resources that require authentication.

The HTML that Salesforce embeds into the iframe works as intended (I verified this by putting it into a simple HTML file and printing) but the encapsulating page breaks the pagination. Going by W3School's article on page-break I suspect it is styling on the outer CSS that is causing the trouble.

Is there anyway to get Salesforce to display a VF page directly, and not in an iframe? If not, what is the best way to solve this problem? Do I need to use JavaScript to just apply style="float:none;" recursively up the DOM?

Answer 1

If you have the development mode footer on then there will be an iframe involved.

<apex:page showHeader="false" sidebar="false">
     <h1>My Page</h1>
     <p>Here is some introductory information</p>
</apex:page>

That gets served by Salesforce to your browser in a page that contains the development mode footer framework in addition to the actual VF page and there's an iframe involved.

<iframe frameborder="0" id="contentPane" name="contentPane" 
   onload="initContentFrame('https://c.na14.visual.force.com/apex/testPage?core.apexpages.devmode.url=1', true, false);" 
   src="/blank.html" 
   style="width: 100%; height: 100%" 
   title="Content Pane"></iframe>

You can turn off the development mode footer either through your user profile or just clicking the "Disable Development Mode" icon which looks like a circle with an 'X' on the upper right corner of the footer. Then bring up your page again it will not contain an iframe, because the development mode footer / environment part will be gone.

I have implemented VF pdfs with the page-break-inside:avoid (different than what you are doing) without any issues, but I haven't attempted it in non pdf VF pages, and it looks like it wouldn't have worked for me because browser support is questionable, outside of opera.

Answer 2

Where are you representing the VF page? Pages can be accessed directly via /apex/{PageName} without an iframe, if that is what you mean - and standardStyleSheets/headers to false should revert any existing CSS.