Display PDF in Web Application

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 solution to what seems to be a simple, common programming issue.

Let me set the scene:

• I’ve got a website/web application that allows the user to search a SQL Server library.
• Most of the documents related to the search results are PDF files.
• The PDF files are stored inside of the SQL Server database a BLOBs.
• I want to be able to dynamically pull a PDF from the database and display it to the user.
• In order to preserve the user’s search progress, I think I’d like to open the file in another browser window/tab
• I’ve figured out how to save the PDF to the server in a specified directory.
• I DON’T want the user to see the path to the file.
• Within reason, I want a solution that works in all major browsers:

1. Internet Explorer
2. FireFox
3. Chrome
4. Safari (including iPhone/iPad Mobile Safari)

Every solution I’ve tried so far has some basic problems wrong with it:

• Using iFrames seems to fail miserably on iPhones/iPad
• Using Server.Transfer (I’m using ASP.NET) shows gibberish instead of PDF
• I’ve tried a couple of demo 3rd party solutions, but they stink, too!

I can’t figure it out! I’m really a desktop developer, and this was EASY in Windows! Why is it so hard with the web?

Am I stupid and this is really an easy exercise, or is this basic task really that hard?

Please help point me in the right direction!

Thanks!!!

Answers:

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Method 1

Have you tried adding a http header with content-disposition-inline? Also you may want to write the result directly to the output response instead of saving it. This would ensure the files actual path is not displayed as your writing it to the response directly.

Eg

Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.AddHeader("Content-disposition","inline");
Response.BinaryWrite(myfilestream.ToArray());

Where myfilestream is a memory stream or if you already have a byte array from your blob you can write it directly to the response without the toarray

Method 2

This link might be useful to you,

http://nilangshah.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/successfully-stream-a-pdf-to-browser-through-https/

You can have pdf opened in a new tab by speccifying target=”_blank” for the link. ByteArray mentioned in the blog is your BLOB from the DB. Hope this helps.

Method 3

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();
}

Method 4

This is how I do to open a PDF document in the browser from an ASP.NET (aspx) page.
In the page OnLoad:

        this.Response.Clear();
        this.Response.Buffer = true;
        this.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
        this.Response.AddHeader("content-length", pdfReportStream.Length.ToString());
        this.Response.BinaryWrite(pdfReportStream.ToByteArray());

        this.Response.End();

Method 5

If you’re looking for client side pdf client, you can have a look at PDF.js that can display any PDF with the default viewer included (you’ll have to transform the viewer.html into a view if in MVC but it’s quite easy).
It’s open source and alive.I had to adapt it a little to be able to show pdf annotations on iphone (digital signatures) by commenting some lines in the js.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0