HowTo: Create PDF by click – on the fly
My college Oliver Guhr wroted a nice blogpost about PDF creation with nFop. The post is in german – but just scroll down to download the soure code.
Today I wanted to show you, how you could create a PDF by just clicking a link on a webpage. Oliver helped me again and wrote the source code of this blog post:
First step: J# dlls
I only have Visual Studio 2008 installed – without the Visual J# library – the "vjslib.dll". You need this dll for nFop. If you don´t have this dll, just download it here: Visual J# Redistributable Packages
The solution: A generic handler
It´s a bit tricky to write the PDF content in the context – here is the complete source code from my ASHX:
<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="PdfHandler" %>
using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Web;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web.Services;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using java.io;
using org.xml.sax;
using org.apache.fop.apps;
using System.IO;
[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]
[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]
public class PdfHandler : IHttpHandler
{
public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
{
context.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
FileInputStream input = new FileInputStream(context.Request.PhysicalApplicationPath+"helloworld.fo");
InputSource source = new InputSource(input);
java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
Driver driver = new Driver(source, output);
driver.setRenderer(Driver.RENDER_PDF);
driver.run();
output.close();
sbyte[] Pdf = output.toByteArray();
BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(context.Response.OutputStream);
for (int i = 0; i < Pdf.Length; i++)
{
bw.Write(Pdf[i]);
}
bw.Close();
}
public bool IsReusable
{
get
{
return false;
}
}
}
A look into the solution explorer:
The helloworld.fo:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
<fo:layout-master-set>
<fo:simple-page-master master-name="A4"³
page-width="210mm" page-height="297mm">
<fo:region-body region-name="xsl-region-body" margin="2cm"/>
</fo:simple-page-master>
</fo:layout-master-set>
<fo:page-sequence master-reference="A4"³>
<!- (in Versionen <2.0 "master-name") ->
<fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body">
<fo:block>Hallo Welt!</fo:block>
</fo:flow>
</fo:page-sequence>
</fo:root>
Now you can create the "helloworld" PDF by just clicking this link:
http://localhost:56602/Pdf/PdfHandler.ashx
Easy 
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Peter
April 26, 2008
Url for democode does not work. Can you correct it?
Robert Muehsig
April 27, 2008
Thanks for the info – the URL should now work