Send PDF to the browser rather than saving to the server - ASP.NET iText 7 C# Web Forms

Question

this is my first time posting on SO

I have been using iText 7 so users of my web app can generate a pdf of a document.

I would like the document sent to the browser so either it gets saved to the user Downloads folder or the user can choose where to save it with the browser save dialog box.

However, all the C# examples I have found require a hard-coded path & file name, so it gets saved on the server rather than client machines.

I have been researching this for a few days now and floundering around with solutions, this is what I have:

public void mtdCreatePDF()
{
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=print.pdf");
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
var stream = new MemoryStream();
var writer = new PdfWriter(stream);
var pdf = new PdfDocument(writer);
var document = new Document(pdf);

document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello world!"));
document.Close();

Response.Write(document);
Response.End();

}

This creates print.pdf in browser Downloads folder, but the file is corrupt.

I would be grateful if someone could point out where I am going wrong, the majority of articles in this regard relate to the older itextsharp, and the iText 7 examples have hard-coded file paths and file names.

I have found one possible solution that looks good, but unfortunately it is in Java. I've been floundering around for ages trying to convert it to C#, but I don't know any Java so it's turned into a pig's breakfast. This is the Java solution:

ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
PdfDocument pdfDoc = new PdfDocument(new PdfWriter(baos));
Document doc = new Document(pdfDoc);
doc.add(new Paragraph("Hello world!"));
doc.close();

// setting some response headers
response.setHeader("Expires", "0");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control",
"must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
response.setHeader("Pragma", "public");
// setting the content type
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
// the contentlength
response.setContentLength(baos.size());
// write ByteArrayOutputStream to the ServletOutputStream
OutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
baos.writeTo(os);
os.flush();
os.close();

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Answer 1

This solution seems to be working perfectly.

public void mtdCreatePDF()
        {
            Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
            Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=print.pdf");
            Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
            var stream = new MemoryStream();
            var writer = new PdfWriter(stream);
            var pdf = new PdfDocument(writer);
            var document = new Document(pdf);
            document.Add(new Paragraph("Hello world!"));
            document.Close();
            Response.BinaryWrite(stream.ToArray());
            Response.End();
        }