@acrossreport/acr-node

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Render ACR (Across Report) report templates directly from Node.js or Electron — no Chromium, no child process, no printer driver. The rendering engine is the same Rust/Skia core used by ACR CLI, ACR Viewer and ACR Designer, loaded in-process as a native addon (napi-rs).

Why

Most report generation in Node apps goes through a headless Chromium (Puppeteer) printing an HTML page, or shells out to a separate tool. Both add real overhead and failure modes. acr-node links the same pixel-accurate ACR renderer straight into your process:

import { renderPdf } from "@acrossreport/acr-node";

const pageCount = renderPdf(templateJson, dataJson, "invoice.pdf");

• Existing ACR template JSON (from ACR Designer or converted from legacy ActiveReports/RDL via ACR Migrate) works as-is — no re-authoring.
• Runs on a bare Node server (Express, Next.js API routes, etc.) just as well as inside an Electron main process.
• No Chromium dependency, no spawned subprocess, no printer or driver required.

Install

npm install @acrossreport/acr-node

Prebuilt for all six major platform/architecture combinations: Windows x64/ARM64, Linux x64/ARM64 (glibc), and macOS (Apple Silicon/Intel) — see Platform support below.

Usage

Quickstart — renders a real sample from acr-samples to a PDF:

curl -LO https://github.com/acrossreport/acr-samples/raw/main/acr-slip-list-en.zip
unzip acr-slip-list-en.zip

import { readFileSync } from "node:fs";
import { renderPdf } from "@acrossreport/acr-node";

const template = readFileSync("acr-slip-list-en.template.json", "utf8"); // made in ACR Designer
const data = readFileSync("acr-slip-list-en.data.json", "utf8");         // shape below

const pageCount = renderPdf(template, data, "slip-list.pdf");
console.log(`slip-list.pdf created (${pageCount} pages)`); // 1394

Data JSON shape: {"Parameters":{"Data":[{column: value, ...}, ...]}} (an empty string is treated as no rows). Use listDataFields(template) to see which column names a given template expects.

Using your own template instead? Swap in its .template.json / .data.json paths — nothing else changes.

More examples — serving PDFs over HTTP with worker-thread concurrency so rendering doesn't block other requests, and a typed version exercising renderPreview (PNG per page), renderPngZip, and listDataFields — are in examples/.

Licensing

Rendering without an activated license key produces output with a watermark (same policy as ACR CLI / ACR Designer / ACR Viewer — see LICENSE.txt). If a license was already activated on this machine by one of those tools, acr-node picks it up automatically; otherwise, activate one directly:

import { activate, licenseStatus } from "@acrossreport/acr-node";

console.log(licenseStatus()); // { licensed: false } before activation

await activate("[email protected]", "ACR-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX"); // throws on failure
console.log(licenseStatus()); // { licensed: true, tier: "..." }

activate() makes a blocking HTTP request to the license server; call it from a background/worker context in Electron if that matters for your app. The resulting activation is cached at %APPDATA%/AcrEngine/license.json (or the OS equivalent) and shared with ACR CLI / ACR Designer / ACR Viewer on the same machine.

Platform support

| Platform | Status | |----------|--------| | Windows x64 | Available | | Windows ARM64 | Available | | Linux x64 (glibc) | Available | | Linux ARM64 (glibc) | Available | | macOS (Apple Silicon) | Available | | macOS (Intel) | Available |

License

See LICENSE.txt. Binary distribution; source is not published. Free to use and to embed in your own Node.js/Electron application, including distributing that application to your own end users. Rendering without an activated license key adds a watermark to the output.