PDF from ASP.NET application

jamesbondajay · July 20th, 2007, 05:13 PM

Hi guys,
Can anyone tell me how i can open a report(which exists as a simple text file) in PDF format. It is a ASP.NET application & language used is VB/NET. Does .NET class library has a class which supports PDF format? Or we need to take help of some third party component? Plz suggest.

planoie · July 20th, 2007, 10:35 PM

.NET does not have a way of converting to PDF. You will need a third party conversion tool.

-Peter

jamesbondajay · July 24th, 2007, 10:55 AM

Thanks.....

thenoseknows · July 26th, 2007, 04:24 PM

Two years ago I had to implement dynamic PDF document creation in an ASP.NET application and it was far more difficult than I anticipated because the third party tools that existed were just not very good.

What we really needed was a tool that could just take an HTML document and turn that into a PDF page keeping it's formatting and layout. I never found such a tool that could actually pull that off. One of the tools I found had a very strange object model and in many cases documentation was sparse. I eventually picked one and getting it to format documents how we needed was a pain in the ass considering the documents really weren't very complex.

If you find a good PDF library, could you let me know? I am sure I will get another project requiring that functionality again at some point!

zaghmout · July 29th, 2007, 12:39 AM

ok look, if this text file contains a defined data, you can create a dataset, use an oleDP data adapter and fill the dataset, and bind it to a cystal report, and then export this report to a PDF

Nothing is impossible. The impossible only takes longer. "Digital Fortress, Dan Brown"

BrendaBessi · December 12th, 2013, 04:48 AM

For future references here is one VB.NET Word component which I found to have a very satisfying PDF results. It offers a feature for converting a HTML to a PDF file in .NET or you can just use a plain text while creating a PDF file.
Also it has this really nice feature for exporting PDF files in ASP.NET, here is an example of it usage:

Code:

' Create a new empty document.
Dim document = New DocumentModel()

' Add document content.
document.Sections.Add(
    New Section(document,
        New Paragraph(document, "Hello world!")))

/ Stream file to browser in PDF file format.
document.Save(Me.Response, "Document.pdf");