In this article I am going to demonstrate how ASP.Net developers can programmatically create PDF documents using iTextSharp. iTextSharp is a software component, that allows developers to programmatically create or manipulate PDF documents. Also this article discusses
the process of creating in-memory file, read/write data from/to
the in-memory file utilizing
the new feature MemoryMappedFile. I have a database of users, where I need to send a notice to all my users as a PDF document.
The sending mail part of it is not covered in this article.
The PDF document will contain
the company letter head, to make it more official. I have a list of users stored in a database table named “tblusers”. For each user I need to send customized message addressed to them personally.
The database structure for
the users is give below. id Title Full Name 1 Mr. Sreeju Nair K. G. 2 Dr. Alberto Mathews 3 Prof. Venketachalam Now I am going to generate
the pdf document that contains some message to
the user, in
the following format. Dear <Title> <FullName>,
The message for
the user. Regards, Administrator Also I have an image, bg.jpg that contains
the background for
the document generated. I have created .Net 4.0 empty web application project named “iTextSharpSample”. First thing I need to do is to download
the iTextSharp dll from
the source forge. You can find
the url for
the download here. http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/files/ I have extracted
the Zip file and added
the itextsharp.dll as a reference to my project. Also I have added a web form named default.aspx to my project. After doing all this,
the solution explorer have
the following view. In
the default.aspx page, I inserted one grid view and associated it with a SQL Data source control that bind data from tblusers. I have added a button column in
the grid view with text “generate pdf”.
The output of
the page in
the browser is as follows. Now I am going to create a pdf document when
the user clicking on
the Generate PDF button. As I mentioned before, I am going to work with
the file in memory, I am not going to create a file in
the disk. I added an event handler for button by specifying onrowcommand event handler. My gridview source looks like <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="False" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" Width="481px" CellPadding="4" ForeColor="#333333" GridLines="None" onrowcommand="Generate_PDF" > ………………………………………………………………………….. ………………………………………………………………………….. </asp:GridView> In
the code behind, I wrote
the corresponding event handler. protected void Generate_PDF(object sender, GridViewCommandEventArgs e) { //
The button click event handler code. // I am going to explain
the code for this section in
the remaining part of
the article }
The Generate_PDF method is straight forward, It get
the title, fullname and message to some variables, then create
the pdf using these variables.
The code for getting data from
the grid view is as follows // get
the row index stored in
the CommandArgument property int index = Convert.ToInt32(e.CommandArgument); // get
the GridViewRow where
the command is raised GridViewRow selectedRow = ((GridView)e.CommandSource).Rows[index]; string title = selectedRow.Cells[1].Text; string fullname = selectedRow.Cells[2].Text; string msg = @"There are some changes in
the company policy, due to this matter you need to submit your latest address to us. Please update your contact details / personnal details by visiting
the member area of
the website. ................................... "; since I don’t want to save
the file in
the disk, I am going
the new feature introduced in .Net framework 4, called Memory-Mapped Files. Using Memory-Mapped mapped file, you can created non-persisted memory mapped files, that are not associated with a file in a disk. So I am going to create a temporary file in memory, add
the pdf content to it, then write it to
the output stream. To
read more about MemoryMappedFile,
read this msdn article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997372.aspx
The below portion of
the code using MemoryMappedFile object to create a test pdf document in memory and perform read/write operation on file.
The CreateViewStream() object will give you a stream that can be used to
read or write data to/from file.
The code is very straight forward and I included comment so that you can understand
the code. using (MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateNew("test1.pdf", 1000000)) { // Create a new pdf document object using
the constructor.
The parameters passed are document size, left margin, right margin, top margin and bottom margin. iTextSharp.text.Document d = new iTextSharp.text.Document(PageSize.A4, 72,72,172,72); //get an instance of
the memory mapped file to stream object so that user can write to this using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { // associate
the document to
the stream. PdfWriter.GetInstance(d, stream); /* add an image as bg*/ iTextSharp.text.Image jpg = iTextSharp.text.Image.GetInstance(Server.MapPath("Image/bg.png")); jpg.Alignment = iTextSharp.text.Image.UNDERLYING; jpg.SetAbsolutePosition(0, 0); //this is
the size of my background letter head image.
the size is in points. this will fit to A4 size document. jpg.ScaleToFit(595, 842); d.Open(); d.Add(jpg); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Dear {0} {1},", title, fullname))); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(msg)); d.Add(new Paragraph("\n")); d.Add(new Paragraph(String.Format("Administrator"))); d.Close(); } //read
the file data byte[] b; using (MemoryMappedViewStream stream = mmf.CreateViewStream()) { BinaryReader rdr = new BinaryReader(stream); b = new byte[mmf.CreateViewStream().Length]; rdr.Read(b, 0, (int)mmf.CreateViewStream().Length); } Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = "Application/pdf"; Response.BinaryWrite(b); Response.End(); } Press ctrl + f5 to run
the application. First I got
the user list. Click on
the generate pdf icon.
The created looks as follows. Summary: Creating pdf document using iTextSharp is easy. You will get lot of information while surfing
the www. Some useful resources and references are mentioned below http://itextsharp.com/ http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/82/iTextSharp-Adding-Text-with-Chunks-Phrases-and-Paragraphs http://somewebguy.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/itextsharp-simplify-your-html-to-pdf-creation/ Hope you enjoyed
the article.
