Asp.Net MVC how to get view to generate PDF

Question

I would like to call an action on a controller. Have the controller get the data from the model. The view then runs and generates a PDF. The only example I have found is in an article by Lou http://whereslou.com/2009/04/12/returning-pdfs-from-an-aspnet-mvc-action. His code is very elegant. The view is using ITextSharp to generate the PDF. The only downside is his example uses the Spark View Engine. Is there a way to do a similar thing with the standard Microsoft view engine?

Answer 1

I use iTextSharp to generate dynamic PDF's in MVC. All you need to do is put your PDF into a Stream object and then your ActionResult return a FileStreamResult. I also set the content-disposition so the user can download it.

 public FileStreamResult PDFGenerator() {     Stream fileStream = GeneratePDF();      HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition",      "attachment; filename=form.pdf");      return new FileStreamResult(fileStream, "application/pdf"); } 

I also have code that enables me to take a template PDF, write text and images to it etc (if you wanted to do that).

• Note: you must set the Stream position to 0.

 private Stream GeneratePDF() {     //create your pdf and put it into the stream... pdf variable below     //comes from a class I use to write content to PDF files      MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();      byte[] byteInfo = pdf.Output();     ms.Write(byteInfo, 0, byteInfo.Length);     ms.Position = 0;      return ms; } 

Answer 2

our final answer to this problem was to use Rotativa.

It wraps up the WKhtmltopdf.exe like some of the other solutions, but it's by far the easiest to use that I have found

I went and up voted all the other answers that also solve the problem well, but this is what we used to solve the problem posed in the question above. It is different from the other answers.

Here is a Rotativa Tutorial.

after you install it, this is all your need

public ActionResult PrintInvoice(int invoiceId) {   return new ActionAsPdf(                  "Invoice",                   new { invoiceId= invoiceId })                   { FileName = "Invoice.pdf" }; } 

Very Very simple.