Hi Peter

Thanks for the previous resolution regarding user control initialization. However, I am still stuck in one problem that's pending for the past one month. Here's my problem:

I am working on a huge telecom project wherein I have to show the customer bills in .pdf format.... and that's it.... this is the problem......

I have a button named "View In PDF", i.e. when a customer clicks on this button, he can view his bills in PDF in a new window (mind it, in the pdf format only, not in IE). And one more thing, this I have to do this without using Crystal Reports
So Peter, if you could help, I will be greatfull.

Thanks
Mike

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Regards
Mike

You touched a nerve! This is the heart of the business I am in. Unfortunately right now we even have yet to find an easy solution. Right now (we are migrating a VB6 solution to .NET) we are using the old COM components that actual print documents to an Adobe Acrobat printer then present the resulting file. We have yet to find a simple component that will do what we need.

What format are the customer's bills in at the moment? Are they actually documents or are they all data?

-Peter

Oops Peter

This may not sound good to me... :) Anyways, my bills are not documented anywhere, I mean to say that I will fetch values from the DB and then show them in customized format in .pdf format. Does it answer your question????

Regards
Mike

It seems that most of the solutions we have found involve 1 of two methods:

1. Convert an existing document (as a file) to a PDF. This is the standard distilling process that happens in Acrobat.

2. Use predefined PDF templates (or PDF forms) and populate the forms with the data then save the result. This is how tax results are done I imagine as those are all standard fill-in-the-blank forms.

You might be able to do what you need with the second solution. You'd have to construct the blank bills, then programmatically populate the data. I recall playing with 'Adobe forms' at one point many years ago, but haven't explored any of that recently.

-Peter

There are also (COM) components available that allow you to create entirely new PDF documents on the fly.

A developer on my team played around with that some time ago, with reasonable success. Unfortunately, I can't find his stuff in source control, but when I am back in the office tomorrow I can take a look if you're interested...

Cheers,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

Yes, I would be interested.

One of the problems we face is that we need to take a stream of RTF and get it into PDF form. All the components I've seen work with lots of document types, but none we've found so far work with RTF. Plus, most expect to work with a file which I'd like to avoid because of the file permission problems encountered with web applications. There are components that allow creation of a PDF from scratch on the fly, but they typically involve creating the objects and elements that go onto the document. Unfortunately, this would involve us having to re-write our document construction engine which right now generates the RTF stream. Plus, our customers often have data that contains RTF codes to do specific things they are used to having supported.

-Peter

I think we used PDF Kit (http://www.pdfstore.com/details.asp?ProdID=685) to create brand new documents on the fly.

Not sure, because I still haven't been able to locate the source.

If PDF kit wasn't what we used, I'll update this thread.

Cheers,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.