Asp.Net MVC how to get view to generate PDF

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I use iTextSharp to generate dynamic PDF’s in MVC. All you need to do is put your PDF into a Stream object and then your ActionResult return a FileStreamResult. I also set the content-disposition so the user can download it.

public FileStreamResult PDFGenerator()
{
    Stream fileStream = GeneratePDF();

    HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", 
    "attachment; filename=form.pdf");

    return new FileStreamResult(fileStream, "application/pdf");
}

I also have code that enables me to take a template PDF, write text and images to it etc (if you wanted to do that).

  • Note: you must set the Stream position to 0.
private Stream GeneratePDF()
{
    //create your pdf and put it into the stream... pdf variable below
    //comes from a class I use to write content to PDF files

    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();

    byte[] byteInfo = pdf.Output();
    ms.Write(byteInfo, 0, byteInfo.Length);
    ms.Position = 0;

    return ms;
}

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