Turn Salesforce Records into PDFs with Apex: A Developer's Quick Guide

PDFs are everywhere in Salesforce projects — invoices, quotes, account summaries, contracts. Most of the time you need to turn a record (or a few records) into a neat PDF and attach it right back to the record.

For a long time, the most common approach was to render a Visualforce page as a PDF. Visualforce still works, but now you can also generate a PDF directly from Apex using Blob.toPdf(). This post walks through the full tutorial on Way2Force.

In this guide, we'll build a very simple PDF and save it as a Salesforce File attached to an Account.

What you'll build

• Query an Account
• Create a small HTML string
• Convert HTML to PDF using Blob.toPdf()
• Save the PDF as a File using ContentVersion
• Attach it to the Account automatically

Quick demo: run this in Execute Anonymous

Account acc = [SELECT Id, Name FROM Account LIMIT 1];

String htmlContent =
    '<html><body>' +
    '<h1>Hello, ' + acc.Name + '!</h1>' +
    '<p>This PDF was generated with Blob.toPdf().</p>' +
    '</body></html>';

Blob pdfBlob = Blob.toPdf(htmlContent);

ContentVersion cv = new ContentVersion();
cv.Title = 'HelloAccount.pdf';
cv.PathOnClient = 'HelloAccount.pdf';
cv.VersionData = pdfBlob;
cv.IsMajorVersion = true;
cv.FirstPublishLocationId = acc.Id; // attach to the same Account

insert cv;

System.debug('PDF created for Account: ' + acc.Name + ' | ContentVersion Id: ' + cv.Id);

Where do you find the PDF?

After running it:

1. Open that Account
2. Go to the Files related list
3. You should see HelloAccount.pdf

Because you set FirstPublishLocationId, Salesforce publishes the file to that record when the first version is created.

How it works

1) HTML is just a String

You're building basic HTML — <h1> for a heading, <p> for a paragraph. Then Salesforce converts that HTML into a PDF.

2) Blob.toPdf() creates the actual PDF binary

Blob.toPdf(htmlContent) returns a Blob, which is the binary data of a PDF file.

3) ContentVersion saves it as a Salesforce File

In Lightning, Files are stored using ContentVersion (a specific version of the file), plus linking records behind the scenes — or explicitly via ContentDocumentLink when you choose.

Conclusion

Generating a PDF in Salesforce can be simple and flexible. You saw how to create a PDF using Apex with Blob.toPdf(), save it as a Salesforce File using ContentVersion, and attach it directly to a record.

This Apex approach is easy to try and quick to test. If you haven't used Blob.toPdf() before, give it a try in your developer org or sandbox and see how it fits into your project.

Keep experimenting, keep learning, and build what works best for you.

Originally published at Way2Force