What kind of markup is this?

Question

I am trying to generate some PDFs from an MVC view and it's been quite a ride. I eventually came across this and am trying to use it but it has this strange markup as shown below (it's based on ITextSharp):

<row>
    <cell borderwidth="0.5" left="false" right="false" top="false" bottom="true">User Name</cell>
    <cell borderwidth="0.5" left="false" right="false" top="false" bottom="true">Description</cell>
    <cell borderwidth="0.5" left="false" right="false" top="false" bottom="true" horizontalalign="right">Lucky Number</cell>
    <cell borderwidth="0.5" left="false" right="false" top="false" bottom="true" horizontalalign="right">Doubled</cell>
</row>

Source

All I am really trying to do at this point is set the width of the column (cell, as it's called here) but cell isn't accepting my style: width or width or anything.

How can I use this thing? Are there any better ways to render PDF from MVC view?

Answer 1

The simplest thing to do would be to create your view in html and convert it to a pdf then send that as your action result.

Simple way to get the html of a razor template http://razorengine.codeplex.com/

string template = "Hello @Model.Name! Welcome to Razor!";
string result = Razor.Parse(template, new { Name = "World" });

Pdf conversion http://www.essentialobjects.com/Products/EOPdf/Default.aspx

Answer 2

Like others have said this is iTextSharp xml. Here is a post that posts list the valid XML elements. How to create tables in a PDF document using XML and iTextSharp?

It looks like you could potentially use CDATA tags to set the width.