Display PDF in Web Application

Question

I have googled this, searched this, looked through SO and other sites (I\'ve been trying to read on this issue for hours now), but I still can\'t seem to find a satisfactory

Answer 1

ASP.Net has a ReportViewer server control that can be used to display PDF files.

Much of the documentation about this feature is about how to generate a report and export it to PDF. MSDN really isn't very helpful. I suppose everyone is relying on Adobe Reader and not looking for an alternative?

But it is possible also to import and display a PDF. This code seemed to work for this user:

public static void RenderToPdf(ReportViewer reportViewer, Boolean forceDownload)
{
    string path = (string.IsNullOrEmpty(reportViewer.LocalReport.ReportPath)) ? reportViewer.ServerReport.ReportPath : reportViewer.LocalReport.ReportPath;
    RenderToPdf(reportViewer, forceDownload, System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(path));
}

public static void RenderToPdf(ReportViewer reportViewer, Boolean forceDownload, string fileNameWithoutExtension)
{
    HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;

    if (!context.Response.Buffer)
    {
        return; //can not clear the buffer, so exit
    }

    //define out properties
    Warning[] warnings;
    string mimeType, encoding, fileNameExtension;
    string[] streams;

    //get pdf content
    Byte[] pdfContent = reportViewer.LocalReport.Render("PDF", null, out mimeType, out encoding, out fileNameExtension, out streams, out warnings);

    //cancel and clear the existing output!
    context.Response.Clear();
    context.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";

    //add a header so that the user can save the target as a downloaded file
    if (forceDownload)
    {
        context.Response.AddHeader("Content-disposition", string.Format("attachment; filename={0}.pdf", fileNameWithoutExtension));
    }

    context.Response.BinaryWrite(pdfContent);
    context.Response.End();
}