I have created a website using MVC3 along with the Razor view engine. What I want to do is take the resulting HTML and store it in a stream or string so that I can write it to a file instead of writing it to the browser.
What I need to do is take the resulting HTML and convert it to PDF and supply the PDF to the user as a form of reporting. I have that portion of it worked out already, I just can't figure out the best way to get the HTML in to a variable of some sort.
EDIT - I ended up going in a little bit different direction and wanted to share the results. I created an attribute that uses the WKHTMLTOPDF project to convert the stream to PDF. Now all I do is add an attribute to the action and instead of rendering the HTML to the browser it pops up a save as dialog.
public class PdfInterceptAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnResultExecuted(ResultExecutedContext filterContext)
{
var viewResult = filterContext.Result as ViewResult;
var workingDir = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PdfWorkingPath"];
var fileName = workingDir + @"\" + Guid.NewGuid() + ".pdf";
if (viewResult != null)
{
var view = viewResult.View;
var writer = new StringWriter();
var viewContext = new ViewContext(filterContext.Controller.ControllerContext, view,
viewResult.ViewData, viewResult.TempData, writer);
view.Render(viewContext, writer);
HtmlToPdf(new StringBuilder(writer.ToString()), fileName);
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Clear();
var pdfByte = File.ReadAllBytes(fileName);
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=Report.pdf");
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.BinaryWrite(pdfByte);
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.End();
}
base.OnResultExecuted(filterContext);
}
private static bool HtmlToPdf(StringBuilder file, string fileName)
{
// assemble destination PDF file name
var workingDir = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PdfWorkingPath"];
var exePath = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["PdfExePath"]; //Path to the WKHTMLTOPDF executable.
var p = new Process
{
StartInfo = {FileName = @"""" + exePath + @""""}
};
var switches = "--print-media-type ";
switches += "--margin-top 4mm --margin-bottom 4mm --margin-right 0mm --margin-left 0mm ";
switches += "--page-size A4 ";
p.StartInfo.Arguments = switches + " " + "-" + " " + fileName;
p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false; // needs to be false in order to redirect output
p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
//p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true; // redirect all 3, as it should be all 3 or none
p.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = workingDir;
p.Start();
var sw = p.StandardInput;
sw.Write(file.ToString());
sw.Close();
// read the output here...
string output = p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();
// ...then wait n milliseconds for exit (as after exit, it can't read the output)
p.WaitForExit(60000);
// read the exit code, close process
int returnCode = p.ExitCode;
p.Close();
// if 0 or 2, it worked (not sure about other values, I want a better way to confirm this)
return (returnCode <= 2);
}
}