Comments on: Dynamic PDF Reporting for Web Applications

By: Kelly Jones

Kelly Jones — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:16:31 +0000

Nice post. Here’s a tool to use to create and publish your report online in minutes, without coding. You can create different graphs and layouts http://www.caspio.com/online-d.....ports.aspx

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What is a good firefox addon to save massive number of pictures on separated links?

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By: E Satheesh

E Satheesh — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:49:12 +0000

In my asp.net application which converts html to pdf using itextsharp, i am facing one issue after creating pdf. In PDF , Some datagrid(its is html) are coming always in next page, Is there any sample code which splits datagrid rows across pdf pages instead of going to new page. Please help me its urgent for my application, If itextsharp doesnt not handle this issue then, is there any solution you have.. Pls help

By: Ben Griswold

Ben Griswold — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:27:37 +0000

@Jose – Thanks for the snippet.

By: jose roberto taveras

jose roberto taveras — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:56:22 +0000

private void makePdf()
{
// the PDF document itself;
Document doc = new Document();
HttpResponse rs = HttpContext.Current.Response;
rs.ContentType = “application/pdf”;

try
{

PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, rs.OutputStream );

HeaderFooter header = new HeaderFooter(
new Phrase(
DateTime.UtcNow.ToString(“yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss”) + ” GMT”,
new Font(Font.COURIER,
),
false
);
// top & bottom borders on by default
header.Border = Rectangle.NO_BORDER;
// center header
header.Alignment = 1;
// add header *before* opening document
doc.Header = header;

doc.Open();

Paragraph p = new Paragraph(“I have to prove better itextsharp “);
p.Alignment = 1;
doc.Add(p);

doc.Close();

}
catch { }
finally { if (doc != null) doc.Close(); }
}

By: ForeignTrades

ForeignTrades — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:20:52 +0000

“Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, iTextSharp requires a physical file be generated.” that’s not true. It can be done without file, just on the fly. Look for an example in google.

By: Robert Sumsion

Robert Sumsion — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:34:25 +0000

Generation of the report to a file is better for me as we are trying to configure sending the report via email or online at user request. Why clutter up memory with this production when most DB’s are memory intensive and large user bases would drain the DB server unneccarily.

By: bgriswold

bgriswold — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 15:31:35 +0000

Thanks again, Bruno. I think you are correct regarding the older samples. There was a case where a table row which “fell” at the bottom on a page was vertically cut in half. This resulted in the top half of the row appearing on page A and the bottom half of the row appearing on page B. It sounds like this issue has been addressed as well, but I’m sure I was using the most recent release of the iTextSharp libraries.

By the way, I am now a proud subscriber to the mailing list. Many thanks.

By: Bruno Lowagie

Bruno Lowagie — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 09:44:12 +0000

I didn’t understand what you meant with that remark. If you add content, such as Paragraphs, Lists, Anchors,… (the objects described in chapter 4 of the book), a new page will be triggered automatically as soon as the page is full. Also: as soon as the page is full, it’s sent to the OutputStream, so that a lot of memory is freed (this is a problem with some other libraries; I use iText to create reports with 10,000+ pages; you shouldn’t keep that many pages in memory!).
Chapter 6 of the book deals with tables, and you’ll see there are different ways to split a table: should iText split a table between two rows, or can the rows be split? You can choose by setting some parameters. iText also supports repeating headers and footers in a table.
Then there’s chapter 7 that explains how you can gain full control over the distribution of content over different pages with ColumnText.
If you tried the .NET examples that can be found on different site, than I understand the problem: those examples are really old. But the book has new examples (in Java) that demonstrate how iText is meant to be used. Most of the examples can be easily adapted to C#.
And there’s always the mailing list

By: bgriswold

bgriswold — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 14:41:50 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Bruno. I’m happy to hear the short-coming was on my end. Can you correct me on the statement I made about page breaks too? I would love to know I incorrectly spoke to this as well.

By: Bruno Lowagie

Bruno Lowagie — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 11:12:05 +0000

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't succeed in generating a PDF in memory using iTextSharp. As a matter of fact you can write PDF to any OutputStream using iTextSharp. The examples all write to a physical file because that's easy to test. (See chapter 1 of my book iText in Action) Please contact the iTextSharp mailing list if you want more info.

By: Ben Griswold

Ben Griswold — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:36:41 +0000

Ranga, This is a very nice overview. Thank you for the write-up. I have used DynamicPDF in the past and, if I recall, I liked the product. I’ll have to give it another look. Thanks again.

By: E.V.Ranganadh

E.V.Ranganadh — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:07:17 +0000

Hi, I actually work for a company that has a product that sounds like it will do exactly what you are looking for. The name of the company is ceTe Software and the product you would need to use is DynamicPDF Generator for .NET, http://www.cete.com/Products/DynamicPDFForNET/. Following are the answers to your questions:

1. Yes, you can generate reports dynamically in memory and output it directly to the Web without requiring to physically create PDF file.

2. Using the DynamicPDF Generator for .NET it is possible to place the tables, text according to the available place on the PDF. You can add the extra text or records of a table which does not fit in a single page to a new page dynamically.

3. This product you can use in web as well as windows applications.

4. You can produce reports of various page sizes by specifying the size in the Page constructor and in Portrait and Landscape orientation. You can also use predefined page sizes included.

5. You can distribute for royalty free if you buy a Developer edition which allows one developer to develop the application and can distribute it for any number of clients. And we do have another licensing model, Server based licensing, which you can use for a single production server and any number of developers can work with that.

6. We have a very good documentation and a lot of examples on all topics and we provide a good supports also.

7. Yes the component has been in market since 2000 and following is the list to our customer list on our web site: http://www.cete.com/AboutUs/CustomerList.csp.

8. The new DynamicPDF ReportWriter product has a designer using which you can generate report layout very easily.

Thanks,

Ranga.

By: bgriswold

bgriswold — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:21:37 +0000

Quick update. I think Siberix has some issues with the 64-bit version of the .NET framework. I have submitted a ticket to Siberix asking if this is a known limitation of their software.

By: Andreas Kraus

Andreas Kraus — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:30:03 +0000

Let us know if you change your mind, need to work with dymnamic PDFs, too, soon

Cheers
Andy

By: Ben Griswold

Ben Griswold — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:49:36 +0000

You couldn’t help yourself. You just had to take a look. This is promising – if I encounter any issues with Siberix, I may give SharpPDF another look.

By: Jon Galloway

Jon Galloway — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:47:16 +0000

I just took a look at SharpPDF. It’s got a method to render to a stream, so I believe that means you don’t need to write to a file. I agree that the NDoc only documentation is pretty bad, though.