如何在ASP.NET MVC中最好地将网格导出为PDF

Question

I don't know that this is necessarily important, but I'm using Infragistics iggrid for my grid and their Reports stuff to export to PDF.

The underlying issue I have is that my data that I want to export is in the browser and I would prefer that I don't have to create a server-side file to download. We have an icon on the screen that the user clicks to download the PDF.

So what I'm doing on the client, is collecting all the data. This has to be done client-side because I want to export the data as the user has it sorted, filtered, and column-ordered (otherwise I could just collect the data server-side which would make this simpler). I then send the data to the server via a POST.

On the server-side I generate the PDF file. Now, obviously, I could save the PDF server-side and redirect to the generated file, but that adds maintenance of temporary files which I'd prefer to avoid (but worst case, I can go there. Just fishing for options right now).

I tried returning the data base64 encoded and then doing:

window.open("data:application/pdf;base64," + encodedData);

This doesn't work (at least in IE) because the URL limit is a bit over 2K.

I tried using the downloadDataURI javascript function here: http://code.google.com/p/download-data-uri/

But that only appears to work with Chrome (even after commenting out the webkit check) and I'm apparently not clever enough to figure out why.

I'm sure I'm missing some obvious possibility that doesn't require creating a server-side file, but I'm just not seeing it. (disclaimer: My daughter woke me up horribly early this morning so the answer could be really trivial and I will feel stupid tomorrow when my brain is working).

Answer 1

On the server-side I generate the PDF file. Now, obviously, I could save the PDF server-side and redirect to the generated file, but that adds maintenance of temporary files which I'd prefer to avoid (but worst case, I can go there. Just fishing for options right now).

You don't need to save it on the server. You can simply stream the PDF File (I assume you have it in some sort of Stream or byte[]) to the user. All you need to do is something like

 Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
 Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "filename.pdf");
 Response.BinaryWrite(bytes);
 Response.Flush();
 Response.Close();
 Response.End();

And this will prompt the user to either save the file or open it in Adobe Reader. The file won't be created on the server at all.