Get Dynamic HTML from Apex Page as CLOB

Question

Good Morning,
I have two APEX pages that are designed to provide formatted report content; however, these are not intended to be navigable from within the application. In other words, I am not letting the user view the pages directly. Instead, their purpose is to generate dynamic content so that I can feed their HTML into a HTML to PDF converter so the generated PDF can be attached to an email and sent to clients. I have found that the easiest way to generate this report is directly in APEX, but I haven't yet found a way to just run the page via a PL/SQL API and retrieve the dynamic content into a CLOB so that I can send it to my converter utility. I have tried UTL_HTTP, but I am either using that API incorrectly, or the security context of the session is not proagating to the call (this is being performed in a secure APEX application), thus I receive the following error [ORA-29273: HTTP request failed ORA-06512: at "SYS.UTL_HTTP", line 1674 ORA-29024: Certificate validation failure]. I am using Apex version 3.2. Does anyone know a good and straight-forward API for doing what I need to accomplish? Thanks in advance.
Erik

Answer 1

To mimic the users session, you'd have to forward on the session cookies as part of the HTTP request.
A simpler option:
* Allow public access to the page
* Apply an authorization scheme to the page that looks something like this...
if owa_util.get_cgi_env('REMOTE_ADDR') = '127.0.0.1' then
  return true;
else
  return false;
end if;(PL/SQL Function Returning Boolean)
Then when you perform the request in your code, use 127.0.0.1 instead of the host name.