Rendering VF page as pdf and sending pdf as an attachment from a list view

Thought i would share something which i needed to work on. I thank Jeff Douglas for his awesome post which helped me in this assignment.

Requirement

    There is a custom visualforce page which is rendered as pdf. There is a button on contact detail page which when clicked would call this vf page. These things were present. In addition to viewing this pdf from contact detail there was also a necessity to email these PDFs that too in bulk from list views.

Solution

list button was created with source as VF page.

<apex:page standardController="contact" recordSetVar="Props" extensions="emailcontact" action="{!sendingemail}">
</apex:page>

Controller is where all the code is

public  class emailcontact {
     public ApexPages.StandardSetController propcontroller{get;set;}
    public list<contact> props{get;set;}  
    public emailcontract(ApexPages.StandardSetController controller) {
    propcontroller =(ApexPages.StandardSetController)controller;   
    }
    public pagereference sendingemail(){
        props = propcontroller.getSelected();// Contains the list of record which is selected from the list  
         
        PageReference pdf = Page.VFpagetoberenderedaspdf;
        for(contact pr : props)
        {
            pdf.getParameters().put('id',pr.Id);
            attachment attach = new attachment();
            Blob body;
            try {
                body = pdf.getContentAsPDF();
                }
            catch (VisualforceException e) {
                body = Blob.valueOf('Missing Text');
                }
            // ********************* for attachment to the contactrecord ******************************   
            try{
            attach.Body = body;        
            attach.Name = 'Contact' +system.today+'.pdf';
            attach.IsPrivate = false;
            attach.ParentId = pr.Id;
            att.add(attach);
            }
            catch(exception e)
            {
           
            }
            // ************************ for email creation************************************   
           
            Messaging.EmailFileAttachment attach2 = new Messaging.EmailFileAttachment();
            attach2.setContentType('application/pdf');
            attach2.setFileName('Contact.pdf');
            attach2.setInline(false);
            attach2.Body = body;
            Messaging.SingleEmailMessage mail = new Messaging.SingleEmailMessage();
            String[] toAddresses = new String[] {pr.Email};
            mail.setToAddresses(toAddresses);
            mail.setSubject('Offer for' + pr.name);// alternatively use templates as well
            mail.setFileAttachments(new Messaging.EmailFileAttachment[] { attach2 });
            mail.setHtmlBody('Please find attached a cash offer for your listing at ');           
            em_sent.add(mail);          
        }
    }
    if(att!= null)
    insert att;
    if(em_sent != null)
    Messaging.sendEmail(em_sent);         
    pagereference pr  = new pagereference('/a0e/o');//will redirect to contact tab
    return pr;
    }
}

Also you can add a piece of code to send an email to yourself to indicate the success or failure of the action or display it in the page

Limitations

Major limitation i faced is no of the records the code can process (Governor limits on callouts). It was limited to 10 after which time out error happened. I tried using batch as well as future calls. Both returned me empty PDFs. Waiting for Salesforce to remove these limitations in future.