Asp.net webform to pdf - c#

I have a simple asp.net registration form where users fill out the information to register. I have it captured in an oracle database.
Is there a way i can generate a pdf from the data in the database and show it like a actual pdf form?
I looked at itextsharp and it has some licensing restrictions. What are some of the other free solutions that stackoverflow users has used that will help my problem?
Thanks

itextsharp is free to use for non-commercial development, but if you use for commercial development then you either need to obtain a license or make your code available under the GPL license.
Here are some alternatives to itextsharp:
PDFSharp is a free option, however its latest release is from 2009.
There is an open-source version of PDFjet.
PDF Clown

You can get the form with contents as PDF, by using the service pdfmyform.com - this is a commercial service that lets you convert the whole webpage including form contents in one go to a PDF, without any development. There's a free plan for limited use.

Related

How to Add and update the comments for the PDF file using c#

Now I am working in the process of Insert and Update the comment for the pdf file using c# code. I want to Know the any possible way to insert a comment inside the pdf file. Anyone Know about this, Please reply and some reference for this process.
Microsoft does have very limited support for PDF in operating system APIs and it has come only recently in Windows 8 for modern applications (now called UWP) and that support doesn't go as far as updating comments.
So you need to use the 3rd party library. As far as I can tell SharpPDF is the only free library worth something, but I failed to open many PDFs in it so I can't recommend it. So I think you would need to search for some commercial library, I am aware of several of them that can do the job (e.g XfiniumPDF, iTextSharp etc) and you'll get the documentation when you license them.

What's the best way to convert docx/pptx documents to PDF from a Windows Universal App?

Usually, I would use the Microsoft Office Interop library, but it requires the use of COM objects, which (as far as I know) isn't possible if I'm developing a Windows Universal app. What are some alternative methods I could use to convert Word and PowerPoint files to PDF from a Windows Universal App? Thanks!
There are a number of 3rd party libraries that will do this for you pretty easily, I have used Synfusion (there's a free version) for a similar workflow with Word, Excel and PDF (not PowerPoint) and while not a huge fan overall of the Syncfusion library (version 11), the Office/PDF stuff has done its job well.
Alternatively, if you're sure you will only be using the latest version of Office docs (extensions ends in X) you should be able to use any of the open office libraries to open the file to read it and use something like itext to export back to PDF. That might be trickier for more complicated documents (like PowerPoint slides).
The Syncfusion seems to be a good set of components even if in my projet i only wanted to print/convert office (.doc and .docx) documents.
Did you try this ? and what do you think of :
the speed of converting
the quality printing pdf files
the quality of converting Word file to pdf
Did you use the free "Community Edition", because i can really image we can use theses library with no cost ! What is the drawback ofusing it from free

Programmatically Generate PDF Report with design

The background right now is that I coded website for the client and as part of the website I have a service calling a webpage every 5-10 minutes to generate some PDFS that become available on the website. The PDFs just contain a data dump of a table that is displayed on the website.
The new requirements are to add a cover page and apply a color scheme to the PDF report which replicates the view on the website.
I'm unsure how to go about this using C# and VS2008 with the backend database being MySQL. I originally thought about creating a report and then somehow programmatically rendering and saving it as a PDF, but because we are using MySQL that throws out the possibility of using Sql Server Reporting Services. Is there any other open source and/or free solution that will allow me to create and design the report and then programmatically create and save as a pdf without any user interaction?
Your best bet is iText here. It supports creating pdf programmatically in java or C#. We use it where I work to do just this thing (also using MySQL on the backend). I also recommend buying the book. It has lots of good examples, and if you purchase the book, you get a pdf version of the book.
Try TCPDF. Though written in PHP, it has no external dependencies, has plenty of options and examples included. Works fast and reliable, no problems with fonts, etc.
jsreport supports exactly this kind of pdf generation. You first create a report layout and dynamic structure using html, css and javascript templating engines. Then you just send the data and invoke the rendering using c# classes.
This blog post should give you more info how to do it.
Disclaimer: I am the author of jsreport.

Use a System.Drawing.Printing.PrintDocument to generate a PDF in memory

Does anyone know if the following is possible and if so what the best way of doing it is for free?
I am generating a PrintDocument in a project I am currently working on and displaying a print dialog box so a user can choose which printer they want to use etc. The is currently a windows form application and if a user wants to print to a PDF they can select to print to CutePDF or something similar.
However I am now putting a ASP.Net web frontend on the application and want to use the same code to generate the PrintDocument but want to print it to a PDF on the fly and serve it up via the Response stream in the format of a PDF download.
So my question is....How can I use the current PrintDocument and generate a PDF in memory from it??
Thanks
The System.Drawing code for a PrintDocument can be reused to generate a PDF document with ABCpdf .NET. See the System.Drawing example...
You would have to use a 3rd party component in order to generate the PDF. The following article has some links to some such components: Generating PDF Files from .Net
You're in a world of hurt if you think you're going to run the "same code" that deals with printers in both a forms app and an ASP.NET app.
You might be in luck, however, as it appears that PDFsharp + MigraDoc might be able to do this for you.
I think you will find there is not any tools that will take a PrintDocument as input and render a PDF as output. The only way to do what you want is to "print" the PrintDocument to a "PDF printer driver" that will generate PDF. Basically a virtual printer that will generate PDF instead of printing the actual output. There are a plethora of products on the market for that. A couple that are cheap and widely used are as follows:
Ghostscript with RedMon (open source/GPL or commercial licenses available)
Foxit Software's PDF Creator ($29)
You really should be looking at iTextSharp (it is mentioned on the iText.NET page recommended earlier)
http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/
PrintDocument is meant for Windows Forms applications but is up and coming in SilverLight, see this video... http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/printing-api-basics/
If you wish to continue with the PrintDocument and a web application, I think SilverLight 4 (which is beta right now) is the only way to go, or your going to have to have a lite weight windows form application installed locally for the end user that maybe uses web services.
iTextSharp is a great tool for generating PDFs with .NET on the Internet. I highly recommend it; I've used iText with Java...and have been using iTextSharp for the past few years.
There are several ports of iText for .NET (A very popular open-source PDF library for Java).
http://www.ujihara.jp/iTextdotNET/en/

How can a Word document be created in C#? [closed]

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I have a project where I would like to generate a report export in MS Word format. The report will include images/graphs, tables, and text. What is the best way to do this? Third party tools? What are your experiences?
The answer is going to depend slightly upon if the application is running on a server or if it is running on the client machine. If you are running on a server then you are going to want to use one of the XML based office generation formats as there are know issues when using Office Automation on a server.
However, if you are working on the client machine then you have a choice of either using Office Automation or using the Office Open XML format (see links below), which is supported by Microsoft Office 2000 and up either natively or through service packs. One draw back to this though is that you might not be able to embed some kinds of graphs or images that you wish to show.
The best way to go about things will all depend sightly upon how much time you have to invest in development. If you go the route of Office Automation there are quite a few good tutorials out there that can be found via Google and is fairly simple to learn. However, the Open Office XML format is fairly new so you might find the learning curve to be a bit higher.
Office Open XML Iinformation
Office Open XML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
OpenXML Developer - http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx
Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx
DocX free library for creating DocX documents, actively developed and very easy and intuitive to use. Since CodePlex is dying, project has moved to github.
I have spent the last week or so getting up to speed on Office Open XML. We have a database application that stores survey data that we want to report in Microsoft Word. You can actually create Word 2007 (docx) files from scratch in C#. The Open XML SDK version 2 includes a cool application called the Document Reflector that will actually provide the C# code to fully recreate a Word document. You can use parts or all of the code, and substitute the bits you want to change on the fly. The help file included with the SDK has some good code samples as well.
There is no need for the Office Interop or any other Office software on the server - the new formats are 100% XML.
Have you considered using .RTF as an alternative?
It supports embedding images and tables as well as text, opens by default using Microsoft Word and whilst it's featureset is more limited (count out any advanced formatting) for something that looks and feels and opens like a Word document it's not far off.
Your end users probably won't notice.
I have found Aspose Words to be the best as not everybody can open Office Open XML/*.docx format files and the Word interop and Word automation can be buggy. Aspose Words supports most document file types from Word 97 upwards.
It is a pay-for component but has great support. The other alternative as already suggested is RTF.
To generate Word documents with Office Automation within .NET, specifically in C# or VB.NET:
Add the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word assembly reference to your project. The path is \Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Office11\Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll.
Follow the Microsoft code example
you can find here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316384/en-us.
Schmidty, if you want to generate Word documents on a web server you will need a licence for each client (not just the web server). See this section in the first link Rob posted:
"Besides the technical problems, you must also consider licensing issues. Current licensing guidelines prevent Office applications from being used on a server to service client requests, unless those clients themselves have licensed copies of Office. Using server-side Automation to provide Office functionality to unlicensed workstations is not covered by the End User License Agreement (EULA)."
If you meet the licensing requirements, I think you will need to use COM Interop - to be specific, the Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies.
Check out VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office). It is fairly simple to create a Word template, inject an xml data island into it, then send it to the client. When the user opens the doc in Word, Word reads the xml and transforms it into WordML and renders it. You will want to look at the ServerDocument class of the VSTO library. No extra licensing is required from my experience.
I have had good success using the Syncfusion Backoffice DocIO which supports doc and docx formats.
In prior releases it did not support everything in word, but accoriding to your list we tested it with tables and text as a mail merge approach and it worked fine.
Not sure about the import of images though. On their blurb page http://www.syncfusion.com/products/DocIO/Backoffice/features/default.aspx it says
Blockquote
Essential DocIO has support for inserting both Scalar and Vector images into the document, in almost all formats. Bitmap, gif, png and tiff are some of the common image types supported.
So its worth considering.
As others have mentioned you can build up a RTF document, there are some good RTF libraries around for .net like http://www.codeproject.com/KB/string/nrtftree.aspx
I faced this problem and created a small library for this. It was used in several projects and then I decided to publish it. It is free and very very simple but I'm sure it will help with you with the task. Invoke the Office Open XML Library, http://invoke.co.nz/products/docx.aspx.
I've written a blog post series on Open XML WordprocessingML document generation. My approach is that you create a template document that contains content controls, and in each content control you write an XPath expression that defines how to retrieve the content from an XML document that contains the data that drives the document generation process. The code is free, and is licensed under the the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). In that same blog post series, I also explore an approach where you write C# code in content controls. The document generation process then processes the template document and generates a C# program that generates the desired documents. One advantage of this approach is that you can use any data source as the source of data for the document generation process. That code is also licenced under the Microsoft Reciprocal License.
I currently do this exact thing.
If the document isn't very big, doesn't contain images and such, then I store it as an RTF with #MergeFields# in it and simply replace them with content, sending the result down to the user as an RTF.
For larger documents, including images and dynamically inserted images, I save the initial Word document as a Single Webpage *.mht file containing the #MergeFields# again. I then do the same as above. Using this, I can easily render a DataTable with some basic Html table tags and replace one of the #MergeFields# with a whole table.
Images can be stored on your server and the url embedded into the document too.
Interestingly, the new Office 2007 file formats are actually zip files - if you rename the extension to .zip you can open them up and see their contents. This means you should be able to switch content such as images in and out using a simple C# zip library.
#Dale Ragan: That will work for the Office 2003 XML format, but that's not portable (as, say, .doc or .docx files would be).
To read/write those, you'll need to use the Word Object Library ActiveX control:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/wordapplication.aspx
#Danny Smurf: Actually this article describes what will become the Office Open XML format which Rob answered with. I will pay more attention to the links I post for now on to make sure there not obsolete. I actually did a search on WordML, which is what it was called at the time.
I believe that the Office Open XML format is the best way to go.
LibreOffice also supports headless interaction via API. Unfortunately there's currently not much information about this feature yet.. :(
You could also use Word document generator. It can be used for client-side or server-side deployment. From the project description:
WordDocumentGenerator is an utility to generate Word documents from
templates using Visual Studio 2010 and Open XML 2.0 SDK.
WordDocumentGenerator helps generate Word documents both
non-refresh-able as well as refresh-able based on predefined templates
using minimum code changes. Content controls are used as placeholders
for document generation. It supports Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Grab it: http://worddocgenerator.codeplex.com/
Download SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5124
Another alternative is Windward Docgen (disclaimer - I'm the founder). With Windward you design the template in Word, including images, tables, graphs, gauges, and anything else you want. You can set tags where data from an XML or SQL datasource is inserted (including functionality like forEach loops, import, etc). And then generate the report to DOCX, PDF, HTML, etc.

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