User click on a link button and it will direct them to a url that is dynmaically generated which a pdf file. The browser will prompt the user to either save or open it.
I want to know if it is possible to downlaod the pdf file to the server then show the pdf file in the asp.net web page. When i google on this question, 99% of top link are some third party component. Is it a way to do this without purchase any 3rd party component?
thank
I use itextsharp, its a free open source c# port of the java itext library.
Makes generating dynamic pdfs in asp.net a breeze and there is lots of documentation/examples floating around.
I don't think that you'll have much luck without a 3rd party component. First, the issue isn't showing the PDF, it is generating it. For that, you'll need a library to help. Rolling one yourself would not be cheaper unless you have an enormous amount of unpaid time on your hands.
With respect to third-party controls, I recommend and use DynamicPDF from CeTe.
Yes there is a way to do this without a 3rd party tool, but it involves coding a PDF-to-html translator.
If this is something for a business, the RoI for the 3rd party control is that you don't have to spend hundreds of hours coding & testing this component, when you could buy one for just a few hundred dollars.
Now, an alternative is to code a page which displays the data in the same way which the PDF file generates it (this could actually be handled by RDLC). So that when the user clicks the link button, they are taken to this display page, from which they can download the PDF version if they want a local copy.
Regardless of how you generate the PDF, I have found a better user experience if you open the PDF in an IFRAME instead of the full browser window. You can give users instructions and maintain the browser navigation.
I think what you want to do is by going to: http://my_site.com/generate-pdf.aspx?=someId
this should in fact just show the PDF file?
What you need to do is change the Response type.
See here for how to do this with images.
Look up the Content-Disposition HTTP header. You can send back a value that requests the content be displayed inline instead of downloaded.
Related
I have a PDF document that is getting generated on the fly, and rendered on the fly to an iFrame within a radwindow. Basically the document is already largely prepopulated, however the user will still have a chunk of information that they are required to enter. I've found a good amount of information about sending a pdf TO an iframe, but not much information about going the other way. I have a button within the radwindow that can access the iframe object, however I'm somewhat lost as to where to go from there.
EDIT: The PDF is an editable form. I'm trying to pull back the entire PDF document as is, after the client side makes their entries to the form.
I think you'll need to send the file to the user so they can edit it locally and instruct them to upload it.
The content-disposition header with value attachment can help with the first task and you can use RadAsyncUpload to upload it: http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/asyncupload/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx.
I am not aware of ways to tap into the PDF viewer plugin the browsers use to show the PDF. Perhaps there is API from Adobe or some other third party plugin but that would rely on them and is out of your control.
Perhaps the JS PDF viewer from FireFox has something: https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/pdfjs/ but I don't know how stable and usable it is.
As per what was described in the comments, I ended up using postbacks through the PDF's themselves along with 1 pixel fields to store data required to identify the documents. It's a little hacky, but functional. I'm leaving this as an actual answer as this is as close to a real solution to the problem I originally had. This has been up and running for close to 4 years in this manner, and thus far hasn't caused any issues.
I am using 4 gridviews on my page. I need to generate a pdf file which should be accessible on a button click and should contain these 4 grids.
Please help.
We have used WKHTMLTOPDF for our PDF's and it has worked very well. You can use it with a URL which it will then convert to a pdf which can then be sent to the users browser. So you could give it the url of your page with the gridview and then it would return a pdf. There are third party providers that can do the conversion for you, such as PDFCrowd, however this comes at a cost. If I recall correctly they provide a C# wrapper for you to use so it is pretty simple. There is also iText PDF, I have never used it though so cannot comment on it.
Hope this gives you a good start.
You could try with Amyuni WebkitPDF. It is a free tool for HTML to PDF or XAML/XPS convertion. You can pass the URL of the page to the library and obtain a PDF file as result that you can send to the browser.
Usual disclaimer applies.
Need some advice on what course of action to take next.
Have written an ASP.Net application. Part of the application deals with being able to view PDFs. The initial PDF viewed acts as an index to access other PDF documents. You click a link in the Index PDF and it jumps to another PDF file. Legal documents, agreements, etc.
This scenario works on some computers and on others it doesn't. I managed to figure out what the problem was. On some of the computers the initial Index PDF was being hosted within the browser and on some other computers it was actually jumping out of the browser and directly into Adobe Acrobat. As soon as the PDF jumps out of the browser and into Acrobat the relative links in the Index PDF stop working because it is hosted client side via Acrobat but the additional PDFs it is trying to access are on the server.
I figured out why some computers stay in browser and why some jump out. There is an option within Acrobat itself that determines this behavior. It is under Edit--> Preferences ----> Display PDF in Browser.
I am in a jam because I am not in control of the PDF documents themselves and how they are written, and I obviously have no control over the options selected in Acrobat on each and every computer. My problem is also compounded by the fact that our firm has just recently purchased a new PDF reader called Nuance that will be pushed out firm wide soon and I don't think it even has the option to have PDFs hosted in browser.
I can get what I need to work if I create the index in HTML, but the problem is I don't write the Indexes and the people who do are not trained in HTML. I can get the people who write the indexes to change from relative links to absolute links, but then I run into the problem of what if we change where we are hosting the PDF files? All the links will break again? I think we are stuck with relative URLs, but how can I make it work?
I am thinking about maybe hosting the PDFs within Silverlight?
Looking for any thoughts or ideas?
Thanks.
Silverlight isn't going to help you here.
The solution really is in finding a better way to create the index document. Just how sophisticated is the index document content anyway?
If you don't want to have to train the authors of these indexes in HTML then can you provide them with a simple tool that they can use to describe the content. You could then have code server side to generate the HTML (even PDF) dynamically.
What you need is a simple redirector ASPX page whose URLs you can use in the PDF documents. Put the paths of the PDFs in a database. Give an ID for each PDF. The ASPX page should accept the ID as a parameter, do a lookup on the database, and response.redirect to the current location of the PDF. You can use URLs based on this ASPX page in the PDFs. If you keep database up to date, then the links in the PDF documents will always lead to the correct location.
In the Database
http://someserver/somepath/abc.pdf
ttp://anotherserver/apath/sdf.pdf
Links in the PDF documents
http://yoursite.com/pdf_redirect.aspx?id=1
http://yoursite.com/pdf_redirect.aspx?id=2
I want to allow an Excel report to be viewed embedded in a WebPage... is there a way?
I don't want to use an ActiveX, or OWC (Office Web Components), I just want to open an existing file from the internet explorer application.
I don't want users to download and then open it.
Using an iframe wouldn't be a problem, but my preliminary tests weren't successful
Any ideas? Is it at all possible?
This has to do with the local person's browser set up and not really anything you can do on your end. If they click a link with the .xls(x) extension, the browser determines if it wants to open it itself or in a new window.
Here 2 microsoft pages on how to change these settings:
http://support.microsoft.com/.../how-to-configure-internet-explorer-to-open-office-documents-in-the-app
http://support.microsoft.com/.../embed-your-excel-workbook-on-your-web-page-or-blog-from-sharepoint-or-onedrive-for-business
You should try using the Excel Web App Embed feature that lets you embed tables and charts from Excel directly on your Web Page. You can even let users interact with the spreadsheet so that they can sort and filter data and use your spreadsheets formulas to calculate make their own calculations all without altering the source.
The Excel Web App and storage is all free from Microsoft. Any data you embed on your Web page can be viewed by all the major destkop and mobile browsers and when you update your spreadsheet the data on your web pages is automatically updated as well.
I think your best bet is going to be extracting the data out of the Excel file and displaying it in a regular HTML table. Excel isn't exactly safe to invoke from a web page and not everyone has it anyway.
Take a look at scribd iPaper Viewer - this is a Flash based Viewer of XLS (and other) docs.
MOSS 2007 has a nifty feature called Excel Services which might fit the bill...
Excel Web App allows embedding "live" interactive spreadsheets on a web page. For an example, see http://datawiz.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/how-to-embed-excel-on-a-web-page/
in your comments you say that the Excel file is on the client's filesystem, not on the webserver. i think the security model of sane browsers forbid this; but wouldn't be surprised if setting high permissions to your pages could allow this.
<iframe src="file:\\yourpath\yourfile.xls" width="100%" height="500"></iframe>
Well this is a bit crude but sort of fits the bill.
Select the area of the spreadsheet you wish to display.
Copy this area into MS Paint.
Select the area in Paint and use the Edit/Copy to/ function to save this as a bitmap.
Now load the bitmap as you would any other pic.
I have an ASP.Net application which as desired feature, users would like to be able to take a screenshot. While I know this can be simulated, it would be really great to have a way to take a URL (or the current rendered page), and turn it into an image which can be stored on the server.
Is this crazy? Is there a way to do it? If so, any references?
I can tell you right now that there is no way to do it from inside the browser, nor should there be. Imagine that your page embeds GMail in an iframe. You could then steal a screenshot of the person's GMail inbox!
This could be made safe by having the browser "black out" all iframes and embeds that would violate cross-domain restrictions.
You could certainly write an extension to do this, but be aware of the security considerations outlined above.
Update: You can use a canvas utility function to get a screenshot of a page on the same origin as your code. There's even a lib to allow you to do this: http://experiments.hertzen.com/jsfeedback/
You can find other possible answers here: Using HTML5/Canvas/JavaScript to take screenshots
Browsershots has an XML-RPC interface and available source code (in Python).
I used the free assembly UrlScreenshot.dll which you can download here.
Works nicely!
There is also WebSiteScreenShot but it's not free.
You could try a browser plugin like IE7 Pro for Internet Explorer which allows you to save a screenshot of the current site to a file on disk. I'm sure there is a comparable plugin for FireFox out there as well.
If you want to do something like you described. You need to call an external process that prints the IE output as described here.
Why don't you take another approach?
If you have the need that users can view the same content over again, then it sounds like that is a business requirement for your application, and so you should be building it into your application.
Structure the URL so that when the same user (assuming you have sessions and the application shows different things to different users) visits the same URL, they always see same thing. They can then bookmark the URL locally, or you can even have an application feature that saves it in a user profile.
Part of this would mean making "clean urls", eg, site.com/view/whatever-information-needed-here.
If you are doing time-based data, where it changes as it gets older, there are probably a couple possible approaches.
If your data is not changing on a regular basis, then you could make the "current" page always, eg, site.com/view/2008-10-20 (add hour/minute/second as appropriate).
If it is refreshing, and/or updating more regularly, have the "current" page as site.com/view .. but allow specifying the exact time afterwards. In this case, you'd have to have a "link to this page" type function, which would link to the permanent URL with the full date/time. Look to google maps for inspiration here-- if you scroll across a map, you can always click "link to here" and it will provide a link that includes the GPS coordinates, objects on the map, etc. In that case it's not a very friendly url but it does work quite well. :)