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OLD TITLE: iTextSharp convert HTML to PDF "The document has no pages."
I am using iTextSharp and xmlworker to convert html from a view to PDF in ASP.NET Core 2.1
I tried many code snippets I found online but all generate an exception:
The document has no pages.
Here is my current code:
public static byte[] ToPdf(string html)
{
byte[] output;
using (var document = new Document())
{
using (var workStream = new MemoryStream())
{
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, workStream);
writer.CloseStream = false;
document.Open();
using (var reader = new StringReader(html))
{
XMLWorkerHelper.GetInstance().ParseXHtml(writer, document, reader);
document.Close();
output = workStream.ToArray();
}
}
}
return output;
}
UPDATE 1
Thanks to @Bruno Lowagie's advice, I upgraded to iText7 and pdfHTML, but I can't find much tutorials about it.
I tried this code:
public static byte[] ToPdf(string html)
{
html = "<html><head><title>Extremely Basic Title</title></head><body>Extremely Basic Content</body></html>";
byte[] output;
using (var workStream = new MemoryStream())
using (var pdfWriter = new PdfWriter(workStream))
{
using (var document = HtmlConverter.ConvertToDocument(html, pdfWriter))
{
//Passes the document to a delegated function to perform some content, margin or page size manipulation
//pdfModifier(document);
}
//Returns the written-to MemoryStream containing the PDF.
return workStream.ToArray();
}
}
but I get
System.NullReferenceException
when I call HtmlConverter.ConvertToDocument(html, pdfWriter)
Am I missing something?
UPDATE 2
I tried to debug using source code.
This is the stack trace
System.NullReferenceException
HResult=0x80004003
Message=Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Source=itext.io
StackTrace: at iText.IO.Font.FontCache..cctor() in S:\Progetti\*****\itext7-dotnet-develop\itext\itext.io\itext\io\font\FontCache.cs:line 76
This is the code that generates the exception:
static FontCache()
{
try
{
LoadRegistry();
foreach (String font in registryNames.Get(FONTS_PROP))
{
allCidFonts.Put(font, ReadFontProperties(font));
}
}
catch (Exception) { }
}
registryNames count = 0 and .Get(FONTS_PROP) throws the exception
UPDATE 3
The problem was related to some sort of cache. I can't really understand what, but as you can see in the code the exception was generated when it tried to load fonts from cache.
I realized that, after having tried the same code on a new project where it worked.
So I cleaned the solution, deleted bin, obj, .vs, killed IIS Express, removed and reinstalled all nuget packages then run again, magically it worked.
Then I had to make only one fix to the code:
Instead of HtmlConverter.ConvertToDocument that generates only a 15 bytes document I used HtmlConverter.ConvertToPdf to generate a full PDF.
Here is the complete code:
public static byte[] ToPdf(string html)
{
using (var workStream = new MemoryStream())
{
using (var pdfWriter = new PdfWriter(workStream))
{
HtmlConverter.ConvertToPdf(html, pdfWriter);
return workStream.ToArray();
}
}
}
581
I had this EXACT same problem, and after digging down all the way to iText7's FontCache object and getting an error when trying to create my OWN FontProgram to use from a raw TTF file (which also failed with the same null reference error), I finally "solved" my problem.
Apparently iText has some internal errors/exceptions that they are just sort of "skipping" and "pushing past", because I realized by accident that I had "Enable Just My Code" in Visual Studios disabled, and so my system was trying to debug iText7's code as well as mine. The moment that I re-enabled it in my Visual Studio settings (Tools > Options > Debugging > General > Enable Just My Code checkbox), the problem magically went away.
So I spent four hours trying to troubleshoot a problem that was in THEIR code, but that they apparently found some way to work around and push through the method anyways even on a null reference failure.
My convert to PDF function is now working just fine.
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