ABCpdf with textboxs not updating in PDF

Question

I am making an invoice website while learning ASP.net MVC, and so far so good. The problem I am running into is when I update an invoice in my app, then try and download it as a pdf, I get the initial content of the page and none of the updates. I'd like to display the pdf before someone downloads it which is working just fine. So I don't know if my problem has something to do with the stream not getting the changes on the page.

If possible I would also like a Guid returned in the URL and have no idea how to do that with how things are currently set up.

Any help would be amazing!

Note: I published the site but ABCpdf errors out (possibly due to it being the trial version), however, locally I can generate a PDF

View

@Html.ActionLink("Download PDF", "DownloadPDF", null, new { @class = "btn btn-action", @target = "_blank" })

Controller

    public ActionResult DownloadPDF()
    {
        Doc pdf = new Doc();
        MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();

        pdf.Rect.Inset(40, 40);
        pdf.HtmlOptions.Engine = EngineType.Gecko;
        pdf.HtmlOptions.UseScript = true;

        pdf.AddImageUrl("http://local.completeinvoice.com/");
        byte[] data = pdf.GetData();

        Response.Clear();
        Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
        Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "inline; filename=invoice-001.pdf");
        Response.AddHeader("content-length", data.Length.ToString());
        Response.BinaryWrite(data);
        Response.Flush();
        Response.End();

        pdf.Flatten();
        pdf.Save(stream);
        stream.Close();
        pdf.Clear();

        return View("Index");
    }

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 27 '13 at 16:06

In reading through http://www.websupergoo.com/helppdf9net/source/3-concepts/g-htmlrender.htm I found that:

You can render any page you can supply a URL for. When you render a page the page has to be reloaded by ABCpdf.

Basically you need a unique URL, that is an actual page, with the data displayed in order for ABCpdf to be able to read the page before it renders it to a PDF.

Another option was to save the page as a .html then read the page from the server then delete the generated .html page.

The page must also be accessible without having to supply any cookies, because abcpdf will not do that. — Ross Presser, May 19 '13 at 19:26

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 18 '13 at 10:02

The URL you supply in this example is the same each time yet you are expecting the output to change each time.

Thus the crucial thing here is to determine how state is being stored. Assuming that this is some type of invoice, where does the invoice number come from?

The normal way to do this would be to encode the invoice ID in the URL. Then in your page pick up the ID and generate the page using that unique identfier.

That way you could email the link to your friend and she would see the same invoice you're seeing. The URL used in above example is generic. If you mailed it to your friend who knows what she would see?

ABCpdf is the same. It really needs a unique URL it can work with. Yes it can work off session state and cookies but it gets really complex and tiresome if you want to do this. Much simpler just to ensure each URL is unique.

So adapt the URL you pass to AddImageUrl so it incorporates the state that is required for the unique page that is going to be returned. Then ABCpdf will see the same thing you see.

I would note that it is also possible for PDFs to be cached in the browser. However this is an uncommon cause of the problem you describe here. I think in this case you would be safe to disregard it.

ABCpdf with textboxs not updating in PDF

2 Answers2