How do I display a PDF using PdfSharp in ASP.Net MVC?

Question

We\'re making an ASP.Net MVC app that needs to be able to generate a PDF and display it to the screen or save it somewhere easy for the user to access. We\'re using PdfSharp

Answer 1

Using Yarx's suggestion and PDFsharp Team's tutorial, this is the code we ended up with:

Controller:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult GenerateReport(ReportPdfInput input)
{
    using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        var manager = new ReportPdfManagerFactory().GetReportPdfManager();
        var document = manager.GenerateReport(input);
        document.Save(stream, false);
        return File(stream.ToArray(), "application/pdf");
    }
}

ReportPdfManager:

public PdfDocument GenerateReport(ReportPdfInput input)
{
    var document = CreateDocument(input);
    var renderer = new PdfDocumentRenderer(true,
        PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfFontEmbedding.Always);
    renderer.Document = document;
    renderer.RenderDocument();

    return renderer.PdfDocument;
}

private Document CreateDocument(ReportPdfInput input)
{
    //Creates a Document and puts content into it
}

Answer 2

I'm not familar with PDF sharp but for MVC is mostly done via built in functionality. You need to get your pdf document represented as an array of bytes. Then you'd simply use MVC's File method to return it to the browser and let it handle the download. Are there any methods on their class to do that?

public class PdfDocumentController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult GenerateReport(ReportPdfInput input)
    {
        //Get document as byte[]
        byte[] documentData;

        return File(documentData, "application/pdf");
    }

}