CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netasp.net-mvcpdfpdf-generation
nkirkes
nkirkes

Reputation: 2665

How to render an ASP.NET MVC View in PDF format

I'm working with ExpertPDF's Html-to-PDF conversion utility for this question (although I'm open to other libraries if there's sufficient documentation).

In short, I have a view that is formatted a specific way and I would like to render it as a PDF document the user can save to disk.

What I have so far is a PrintService (which implements an IPrintService interface) and this implementation has two overloads for PrintToPDF(), one that takes just a URL and another that takes an HTML string, and both of which return a byte[]. I've only worked out the details of the second overload which requires the HTML string.

What I would like to do from my controller is something like:

public FileStreamResult Print(int id)
{
    var model = _CustomRepository.Get(id);
    string renderedView = SomethingThatRendersMyViewAsAString(model);
    Stream byteStream = _PrintService.PrintToPdf(renderedView);
    HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", 
        "attachment; filename=report.pdf");
    return new FileStreamResult(byteStream, "application/pdf");  
}

which in theory would render a PDF to the page. It's the "SomethingThatRendersMyViewAsAString" that I'm looking for help with. Is there a quick way to get the string representation of a View? Or perhaps I should just stick with the URL overload and pass in a URL to the view... Any other thoughts?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 27

Views: 75363

Answers (4)

Leonel Sanches da Silva
Leonel Sanches da Silva

Reputation: 7230

The best package I've found is the RazorPDF, available as a package at NuGet.org, based on iTextSharp. Works on Azure Web Sites:

https://nuget.org/packages/RazorPDF

Upvotes: 0

tvanfosson
tvanfosson

Reputation: 532735

You might be able to tap into the Response during OnResultExecuting and replace the Filter property with something that stores the resultant HTML in a MemoryStream. Then you could clear the Response during OnResultExecuted and replace it with the results of your PDF conversion. I'm not sure that this would be better than just getting the HTML from the URL, though.

 public FileStreamResult Print(int id)
 {
     var model = _CustomRepository.Get(id);
     this.ConvertToPDF = true;
     return View( "HtmlView" );
 }

 public override OnResultExecuting( ResultExecutingContext context )
 {
      if (this.ConvertToPDF)
      {
          this.PDFStream = new MemoryStream();
          context.HttpContext.Response.Filter = new PDFStreamFilter( this.PDFStream );
      }
 }

 public override OnResultExecuted( ResultExecutedContext context )
 {
      if (this.ConvertToPDF)
      {
          context.HttpContext.Response.Clear();
          this.PDFStream.Seek( 0, SeekOrigin.Begin );
          Stream byteStream = _PrintService.PrintToPDF( this.PDFStream );
          StreamReader reader = new StreamReader( byteStream );
          context.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader( "content-disposition",
                 "attachment; filename=report.pdf" );
          context.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader( "content-type",
                 "application/pdf" );
          context.HttpContext.Response.Write( reader.ReadToEnd() );
      }
}

The PDFStreamFilter would need to override the "Write" method(s) and send the data to the memory stream instead.

Upvotes: 10

Giorgio Bozio
Giorgio Bozio

Reputation: 3037

I packaged my solution in a Nuget package: Rotativa http://nuget.org/packages/Rotativa. It's based on wkhtmltopdf.

Usage is really simple.

Having an action you would like to serve as Pdf, instead of Html page. You can define an action that returns an ActionResult of the type ActionAsPdf (RouteAsPdf is also available). So the code is just:

public ActionResult PrintIndex()
{
    return new ActionAsPdf("Index", new { name = "Giorgio" }) { FileName = "Test.pdf" };
}

With name = "Giorgio" being a route parameter.

It works even if the action to print is protected by web forms authentication ([Authorize] attribute)

Upvotes: 104

Jason
Jason

Reputation: 1784

This sounds like a similar problem I had where I wanted to use Views as email templates. The best answer I found for getting the string representation of a View was here: Render a view as a string

Upvotes: 1

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