I am working on an asp.net mvc project. How can I open doc.file to print it from page? The only thing I can do now is downloading, however, I'd like to open it as print friendly file in sort of window.print()
Normally you just supply correct content type. Then user can view the file inside the browser and print it.
However, if the browser doesn't have appropriate plugin, then user can only download the file.
public ActionResult Download()
{
return File("~/MyDocument.doc", "application/vnd.ms-word", "MyDocument.doc");
}
.doc files are designed to be opened with MS Word (and at one point there was a Word Viewer presumably designed for this sort of thing). There are also other apps (e.g. OpenOffice / LibreOffice) which will allow you to read & write MS Word documents with varying degrees of success.
So one option -- as #Win points out -- is to require that users have some compatible application installed. You frequently see this with PDF files, the site will typically contain a link to download Adobe (Acrobat) Reader. The external app will be used to display the file; if the app can run as a plugin the content will be displayed "inside" the browser.
If the app is primarily intended for users internal to your business, and they all have Office installed, then that's a perfectly acceptable solution.
If you want the content to be available people who don't have Office (and/or don't run Windows) it gets much more difficult. You'd need to either:
write an MVC view that will parse/render .doc files (not for the faint of heart)
convert the content to some other format (PDF or HTML) that's more easily "consumed".
Related
Working on a task that displaying or previewing an excel file, which generated by EPPlus, on web page (.aspx).
Now, my problem is all the source point to the keywords: excel web app, excel web service, sharepoint or Excel online, but when i dug into those keywords i lose myself. Most of the information are about how to do the task inside the excel, such as save as html, publish to sharepoint etc. And the rest of the information are delivered by brain-unfriendly example or language.
So I am wondering can someone give me a walk-through method about publishing or displaying or previewing or editing an Excel file on web page(.aspx) by C# language and .NET framework.
Thanks.
You can't natively modify Excel files in web browsers. Browsers can support some files such as Java Applets or Adobe Flash, but those requires plugins, and they don't exist for Excel files.
Instead, you should create an HTML representation of the Excel file, and allow the user to then manipulate the HTML representation. When they're done, generate an Excel file based on their changes.
Alternatively, allow the user to download the Excel file and make their changes, and allow them to publish the changes back to the server by uploading the file.
Its a general scenario when we provide an option of attaching a file (MS .doc) to end user. This file is stored in DB as binary. When user try to access this attachment next time, we allow them to download it. Now, here I want to give a feature to user where he should be able to open this doc file on click, edit it and save it without downloading.
.doc is a binary format and not easy to work with - a library such as Aspose, as mentioned by Christian, is definitely the way to go.
However, if .DOCX is acceptable (and that's Office 2007 and higher), then you can achieve what you want in three steps:
Convert .docx to HTML
Convert Word to HTML then render HTML on webpage
Display the HTML using any rich text control of your choice
What is the best rich textarea editor for jQuery?
Finally, convert HTML back to .docx:
Convert Html to Docx in c#
You would have to "reinvent" Microsoft Office Online (look into your skydrive account). I am unsure if there are any "out of the box" libraries for that, but you could build a simple editing app by leveraging Aspose word (or some other library). But that would be far from simple.
Link to aspose: http://www.aspose.com/.net/word-component.aspx
Word will only open files that are locally stored. What you are looking for is something similar to editing items that SharePoint provides using the WebDAV interface.
You may be able to use this approach to support your requirement. You should be cautious about the security aspects of the solution unless you have fully authenticated access to the shared folder on the server.
I am not sure if a standalone MS Word Document editor exists. However, this can be done with using a combination of rich text formatting / converting tool (for example, the DevExpress ASPxHtmlEditor + Document Server):
Load binary data from a DB;
Import loaded data (MS Word content) as HTML content into the ASPxHtmlEditor;
Edit imported data via the WYSIWYG ASPxHtmlEditor;
Convert the edited HTML back to MS Word content;
Save the converted / edited MS Word content back to the DB.
I believe, it is possible to do something like this if you have such products (free or commercial analogs) in your project.
I am developing a ASP .NET MVC application where users are able to upload files to a repository. Those files could be pdf, doc, any type of image and so on.
When the user select a file to be imported I would like to display this file in the browser so they can review its contents before the upload.
I know I could use some sort of IFrame to display pdf but I am looking for some specific class or .net libraries to implement this feature.
I just need a north.
This is an extremely difficult problem. There are some libraries that can help. For instance PDF files might be rendered to images with ghostscript. Word and Excel files might be converted to PDF or image with a number of libraries. None of them, AFAIK, are very good at it so I can not recommend one.
You could automate MSO to perform the conversion to PDF, but that is decidedly not safe for server code. Another possibility is convert source documents to SWF files (like flexpaper) and display in flash. There are some great libraries out there, but it will limit your supported clients. Sharepoint has support for providing some of this capability as well. Others have used OpenOffice to convert MSO documents but also at a loss of quality.
I can't really advise any specific direction as it is highly dependent on what you/your company is willing to spend and the desired results. Good luck.
You could try to rely on Windows and the explorer thumbnails for it, like here, but then you'd have to make sure that:
You can abuse the server in the most elaborate way (install stuff, talk to the shell from ASP.NET)
You have a thumbnail provider installed on the server for every type that you want to preview. I guess from the moment you can see the thumbnail in explorer, you're set. So for pdf, you might need to install PDF Reader from Adobe.
Docx files should be saved with thumbnail checked (see link). There seems to be no other easy, free way to convert a docx to a thumbnail. The "best" solution I came across, was saving it automatically again somehow, and making sure the thumbnail option is checked.
I don't want to say that's impossible, but it can't be done with finite effort.
What you are asking for is a browser-based solution, because you want the user to be able to "review" the document before uploading.
Therefore you cannot use a server side solution, which is essentially what is being asked by referring to a ".Net library".
.Net libraries are dependent on an installed version of .Net, which does not exist in all versions for all operating systems for which graphical browsers exist.
Next, recent changes in browser security do not allow to read the full client-side file name of the selected file in the input field.
You'd have to rely on HTML5 and its FileReader to access the file's byte stream, but even then you can only retrieve image from image files. (see sample)
Excluding browser-based solutions in Flash, ActiveX, Java, due to browser and platform support, this leaves JavaScript as the only "reasonable" solution: you'd need a library for each supported format to either convert a file into an image in an image format supported by browsers, or extract the text(+image) representation of a file.
Great awnsers... Just want to share the result of my research and I found a nice client-based solution supported by Mozilla Labs. This is a framework based on HTML5 and Javascript with no native code needed.
Here the project website:
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
This is what you are capable of:
http://mozilla.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
And for the last a great video explaning how everthing works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv15UY-4Fg8&noredirect=1
Reguarding my question we are going to converter every possible file to PDF on the server and then render this PDF using this framework.
I would like to develop an app for printing service in Windows Phone 7. In the app, the users can select file to print out. Is there any way to open docx, xlsx, etc. in WP7 programmatically? I know in iPhone the WebView supports to view many file types. Is there anything similar in WP7?
If you are looking to open the document in Office, try using the WebBrowserTask to navigate to the document. There's a good chance it will open with Office.
If you want to render the document yourself, you are very much out of luck. You could try navigating to the document in a WebBrowser control, but I don't think it's supported.
Besides, there are no printing APIs so there would be no way to print it. If this is an enterprise application (ie. internal to your company), you might consider writing a web service on a local server that can accept DOCX files and print them. You could then call that service from your app to print the docs.
You will not be able to open these types of files from the isolated storage. There is no way for third-party applications to launch the external application required for viewing these file types. All of the files which you have listed in your question are XML-based open source file formats. Depending on how much time you want to spend on this, you could write your own parser or possibly utilize an open-source or commercial one.
On the server that my application is being run on, a virtual PDF printer is being installed (don't know much about this yet, except it's from Adobe), and my application needs to use this 'printer' to create PDF's from HTML pages (a GridView mostly), and then redirect the user to the URL of the where the PDF is stored.
I've been looking at the PrintDocument object in System.Drawing.Printing, however I've read that you can't simply feed this a HTML page. What are my choices? The easiest option would be to be able to 'print' a given HTML page (choosing what and what not to print using CSS), but from what I've read this is fairly difficult, so I'm thinking about somehow constructing whatever object PrintDocument needs programatically, if that makes sense.
Any ideas on how I should do this?
there are some free/cheap libs for creating pdfs on the fly. I've used itextsharp before and it worked pretty well. Takes a bit of time to get up to speed in how it works but I'd suggest checking it out.
There are also printing services like Neevia DocConverter that will monitor a folder and auto convert whatever you put in the folder to a pdf, jpg, etc. you can set it up so that if you drop a url shortcut in the folder it will render the webpage at that url to pdf. it's a bit more of a pain if you want to do realtime rendering but works excellent for generating mass reports in batches that you want to post up to a website or email later.