I'm hoping people have some ideas to help solve this problem.
I am developing a C# ASP.NET website and the client requires an online form that users will fill in and submit. OK, so far so good.....
Imagine, say, a form that you fill in on paper - they normally have a distinctive look specific to the company and will be filed, quite possibly as a legally binding document.
I need to have an online form that when submitted emails the client with something they can print out and will look exactly like their printed forms.
As this is web based, I think the option of capturing a screenshot are out the question, so I'm wondering how best to approach this?
Even if I just had a form that captures the data presented how I want, how could I translate this data into the view they want?
Any ideas and suggestions greatly appreciated.
You'll need to take the raw data that was submitted and import it into a standard document (likely PDF). You can use Crystal or another reporting solution, or direct to PDF using one of the many PDF .NET solutions that are out there.
I don't think you'd even want to deal with making the document physically match the screen - much easier to make the web look like the web, and make the printed doc look like a printed doc.
Print a page (this one) from a Browser, notice all the headers and footers?
If you want serious control over how it is going to look, you will need to generate a PDF (or maybe XPS).
Couldn't you just use a sepparate page with a CSS that gives the desired look & feel?
Related
Ok I've tried this in every possible combination... I know this can be done in Access, so I know it can be done in C#...
What I'm trying to do is set up a print button, that when clicked, organizes data from various controls on my form into specific positions on a predefined template. Like say I'm generating a Job Estimate, and I want to print it... It would look silly printing the control or form, so I'd like it organized into a neat standard format on a page, that may include a logo etc. I don't want the data exported to a document, I just want the print button to auto-generate this so that it can be printed from the application.
Can anyone point me to some resource that deals with this? I have googled my mind away, and searched all over stack overflow, but I'm not even sure what the correct wording to look something like this up with is, as it keeps giving me c++ or some other random stuff to look at that has nothing to do with what I am looking for....
What you are looking for is a reporting tool, which can render a structured report to screen, or to print or to a file format like PDF.
Many reporting tools exist for .Net development, Crystal Reports, Active Reports, Reporting Services in SQL Server.
Some day the professor tells to me that he want to do a website that needs much data, and he wants me to do the copy and the stick that we should bring the links's content to the Excel, but it's too much.
So I need to to do a program (C#) that it could catch the Html's links what I want and export them to an Excel document.
If somebody knows a little about it, please tell me some ideas. Because It's my first time to do the work, and I don't have the ideas to do preparation.
Just tell me what I must learn. Just take several minutes for my work which takes too much. Thank you too much!
Although there are many ways to access the page itself: WebClient, or HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse if you need something more complex. I believe that using Regular expressions to parse the pages(once you get them) and retrieve the links is definetly the way to go.
The term you should look for is web scraping. Very easy to do using simple C# code like this. Also writing the excel file (example) is something very easy to find searching for it on Google.
I'm currently having a couple of reports which I print from my Forms applications.
However building printed reports only with the built-in .NET printing methods is very tedious. Even just printing a simple table on a couple of pages with a little bit of formatting is a task for a couple of hours (if it should look nice).
What I need is a WYSIWYG-Designer for the layouts, so I'd like to write one.
It shouldn't be for End-Users, but for me as a developer, it's just about to create the layout what the report will look like with various arrangements/fonts/images/formats and so on and not have to do that by trial & error in code (and restart the app a zillion times).
So my specific questions:
What would I use as a canvas for editing and display of the report? An image-control/bitmap which I draw upon like on the printed document? Is there a better way?
Is drawing on a form comparable to drawing on a printed page? What about differences in resolution printer vs. screen?
How to get real WYSIWYG? Should I get the printer settings and create my canvas with the same resolution? Is there something else to consider?
I know that there are report designers around but I think it's sometimes good to understand the basic working principles of what you use and implementing them is for me the best way to do that.
I'm aware that this is not a specific question A to which the answer is always B, but if it were that way I would find an answer in Google pretty quickly.
Thanks in advance!
I can't say much about designing a WYSIWYG editor, but I have written a few custom in-house reporting engines for use by our development team.
There's two main ways I've created reports. The first is using PDFsharp (MIT-licensed) to manually layout pages which isn't for the faint-of-heart.
The second is using Winnovative's HTML to PDF library (not free, but royalty-free) which uses the current installed version of IE to do the layout and spit out a PDF. It looks like they've recently released a new version called EVO PDF which I have never used before.*
For the HTML to PDF solution, it supports JavaScript so you can add in charts from JavaScript libraries like flot or jqplot.
*I'm not affiliated with Winnovative.
You might want to save time and use Visual Studio HTML designer as your WYSIWYG editor.
What I'm currently doing is using ASP.NET MVC 3 as a simple reporting engine. You can use the MVC pattern to really separate your reporting data source (Model) and the rendering (View) while using Visual Studio as your report designer.
From your application you can easily call your actions with the report optional parameters. For example:
http://localhost/Report/Customer/Orders/1
You simply get the returning string from a WebClient's DownloadString method and you have your report generated.
There is some down side using HTML, mainly the difficulties to know when a page would break, but by using code in your View you can calculate the amount of repeating items and add a CSS break-page and re-starting your table's header on the next page.
You can achieve anything from graphics, to table, you can even generate link to other reports.
HTH.
Printing Reports in Windows Forms
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms996472.aspx
First of all, I hope my question doesn't bother you. I really need to get and idea of how I can accomplish that, but unfortunatelly, I'm really a beginner, I'm crawling when it comes to programming. I'm struggling to learn it the best way I can. I'll thank you for any help you give me.
Here's the task: I was ordered to find a way to collect some data from a website using a c# application. This will be done everyday, in order to update the data which we'll use to calculate some financial index.
I know my question might sound vague, anyway, even telling me how I can be more precise will help me. I know I seem to know desperate, but putting appart all the personell issues, my scholarship kind of depends on it.
Thanks in advance! (Please, don't mind the bad English, I'm brasilian and my English might not be that good yet.)
First, your English is fine. In fact, I thought you were a native speaker until you said otherwise.
The term you're looking for is 'site scraping'. Observe this question: Options for HTML scraping?. The second answer points to an HTML agility pack library you can use.
Now, there are two possibilities here. The first is you have to parse the HTML and scrape your data out of it. This is more computationally intensive and depends on the layout of the page. If they change the way the site looks, it could break the scraper.
The second possibility is they provide some XML or JSON web service you can consume. In this case you aren't scraping anything, but are rather using a true data feed. If the layout of the site changes, you will not break. Whether your target site supports this form of data feed is up to the site.
If I understand your question, you're being asked to do some Web Scraping, where you 1) download the contents of a web page and 2) try to parse data from that content.
For step #1, you should look into using a WebClient object in C# to download the HTML from the web page. You can give a WebClient object the URL you want to download the content from and obtain a String containing the content (probably HTML) of the URL.
How you go about doing step #2 depends on what content is present at the web site. If you know of certain patterns you're looking for in the HTML, you can search the HTML string using various methods. A more general solution for parsing HTML data can be found through using the Html Agility Pack, which will let you handle the HTML as a tree structure (DOM).
Use the WebClient class to get the page.
Turn the html into xml.
Use XPath to select the data you are interested in.
Ok, this is a pretty straightforward app design, and a lot of the code exists that you can reuse. Since you're a beginner, I'll break down into steps of what you need to do and recommend approaches.
1) You will use classes from System.Net to pull the web pages (WebClient being the easiest to usse). You will want to have this part of the program run on a timer if you can (using the scheduled jobs feature of the OS) and have it just pull the pages and drop them in a folder.
2) You have a second job which will run separately, pulling unread files from that folder, parsing them (using the HtmlAgility pack library is best) and then storing them in an index of some kind (Lucene is best for that)
3) You have a front end application of some sort (web or desktop) which queries that index for the information you're looking for.
This question asks how to restrict for a whole server. I just want to do so for a single report. I found a code snippet but it doesn't provide any clues on how to implement:
foreach (RenderingExtension extension in this.reportViewer.LocalReport.ListRenderingExtensions()) {
if (extension.Name == "PDF") {
((Extension)(extension.GetType().GetField("m_serverExtension", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(extension))).Visible = false;
}
I can't see how to make the report reference this code upon loading. Does anyone know how I am supposed to make the report execute this code?
EDIT: Incidentally report access is through the SSRS Report Manager web app. We are, in the main, delighted with this product so wouldn't consider reinventing the wheel in order to implement a hack to produce what is, essentially a "would be nice" feature.
It still boggles the mind slightly that the report's available rendering options are not controllable at the report level. Ho hum.
Incidentally I found this blog entry which clarifies the above code a little. Turns out we're talking about using a reportviewer component to limit the export options. Apparently this requires a dirty, dirty hack and besides it's not how we want to run our reporting function.
So unless anyone has a better idea than this within the next fortnight I'll mark this as the answer which basically sums up to:
You can only restrict functionality like this under certain conditions and by no means easily even when you do.
This seems like a clear failure in the wider fitness of SSRS for purpose as we have users who require Excel export functionality and users who need to be limited to PDF only. Oh well.
Does it matter?
Once they've downloaded the data and taken it offsite, you've lost it anyway.
You haven't really described how you are calling the reports - have you created some kind of application? Are you actually using the report viewer control?
You can generate a report in a specific format using the report URL and including the rs:Format parameter, e.g.
http://SERVER/reportserver?%2fSomeFolder%2fSomeReport&rs:Command=Render&rs:Format=PDF
The above URL generates the report as a PDF. You can also use the URL to hide the report toolbar etc. so you could create these URLs as links in your application, maybe one using just rs:Command=Render as a "View Report" link and one link that includes rs:Format=PDF as an "Export to PDF" link.
More on Reporting Services URL access.