Viewing document file contents within an ASP .NET Page - c#

I have an ASP .NET web page which lists e-mail attachments. These attachments are your typical .docx, .pdf, .jpg, .tiff etc formats.
I'm looking for a solution (perhaps a component?) that will allow me to view the contents of these attachments in a scrollable panel for review by the user.
We have decided against the option of downloading the file and viewing it locally - so that's not an option.
Any ideas will be very helpful.

As I mentioned in the comments, Accusoft's Prizm Content Connect software has an HTML5 viewer for over 300 different formats, but has a heavy price tag on it.
Considering the priority of file formats I need to support, I settled on the solutions below:
PDF - Free; pdfobject provides a lightweight javascript option that embeds into the page.
Image Formats - Free; A simple native image control can be used.
Docx/Doc - License; Aspose.Words provides a component to build and view Word documents in WinForms and ASP .NET

Related

Convert asp.net page to Word document

I have built several PDF documents dynamically from ASP.NET pages (HTML/CSS) using plugins like Winnovative HtmlToPDFconverter. It has always been a successful outcome using the built-in functionality for those plugins, like merging existing PDF documents with dynamic content and adding pre-defined headers and footers, adding page margins, page numbers and so forth. The HTML content has overall been rendered as expected in the final PDF document(s).
Is there any way/any advice for a similar .NET plugin that can render HTML/CSHTML to a Microsoft Word document (.docx) in the same way – or is it too difficult to render native HTML5 and CSS into a desirable layout for a Microsoft Word Document?
I have googled around and found some suggestions, but I'm looking for recommendations for maybe a specific plugin – or a warning if it is a no-go
and too difficult to get the desired layout 1:1 from HTML to a Word document because of incompatibility between markups?
Devexpress HTML editor can export its HTML content to different formats including docx and rtf. Not sure about its limitations (e.g. script and canvas export, etc.), but in the common case it works well.

Print doc files in asp.net mvc project

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".

editable word document attachment

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.

.NET graphic libraries to display images (pdf, .docx and any other format of image) in the browser

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.

Generating PDF Report from database in C#, specifically ASP

I need to generate a high quality report based on information in a SQL Server database, and I want very explicit control of the layout and appearance from inside C#.
I have several choices that I know of that are already being used for various other reports at our company:
1) SQL Server's built in Reporting Services
2) Adobe Forms
3) Crystal Reports
This information I need as PDF directly parallels what is already being displayed in the user's web browser as HTML, so creating a print stylesheet and converting the browser body to PDF is an option as well.
So this creates option 4:
4) JavaScript convert HTML to PDF (my preference at this time)
Does anybody have a recommendation as to which approach I should take, or even better an alternative? All the choices seem pretty horrible.
I've used iTextSharp with very good results. It is an open-source .NET port of a java library. It works really well for creating PDFs from scratch. Remember that editing PDFs will always be hacky with any library, because PDF is an output format, not a read-write format.
Provided your HTML is fairly clean (remove javascript postbacks, anchors, ...),the iText HtmlWorker can convert HTML to PDF, if you prefer that route.
HTML to PDF in using iTextSharp:
Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4);
HTMLWorker parser = new HTMLWorker(doc);
PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, Response.OutputStream);
Also here.
Use SSRS, it has a built in PDF rendering mode.
I have used two other PDF report libraries with great success; Active Reports and Telerik Reporting. Personally I prefer the latter when it comes to programmatic control of layout and such.
Take a look also at the DevExpress Reporting (non-free 3rd party tool):
Overview
Online Demos
Documentation
Yes, you should use the best tools to get the best solution. The best tool in this case probably is SSRS.
But that's just looking at the capabilities of the tool.
Don't forget to look at your own capabilities!
My story: I know SQL, I know C#. (Both intermediate, I'm not a guru.)
Then I lay my hands on SSRS. And burnt them, once, twice, etc.
At the end, there was a nice result. So burning your fingers is not a wrong thing to do.
But first try to pull your html through an html to pdf converter (demo version) and see if the result it serves your needs.
Currently I'm using both:
SSRS for creating invoices, because amounts have to be transported from one page to the next
Winnovative to generate documents that only need page numbers
I would suggest using .Net ReportViewer control in local mode (no report server required). It works in both webforms and winforms. You create a client-side report (.rdlc) file (which contains all the visuals as well as placement of data fields), link it up to the ReportViewer, and supply the data (DataTable or collection of objects, as long as the fields match, it doesn't matter). In client mode it supports exporting to pdf and excel (and Word too? don't remember). By default these done by a dropdown in the control itself however you can programmatically export to any of the supported formats as well. You'll end up with a byte array you can shove into a file stream.
Basically you get most of the good parts of SSRS without all of that backend complexity. There should be a ReportViewer folder in %programFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\ReportViewer - but versions exist for 2005 and 2008 as well. Check out http://gotreportviewer.com/
I think the 4th option is the best. In this case you don't need to change either layout of the HTML page or a layout of PDF, if one of them has been changed.
It is also more convenient making a nice design via HTML than programmatically via C# :)
Take a look at WebToPDF.NET which is a .NET component written in C# that converts HTML to PDF. The converter supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 including page breaks, forms and links. It passes all W3C tests (except BIDI).
You can use Fast Report it's good tool and i has a free version

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