Delivering a PDF to a Browser

Delivering a PDF to a Browser

Method 1: Anchor Tags

The <a> tag defines a hyperlink, which is used to link from one page to another.

The most important attribute of the <a> element is the href attribute, which indicates the link's destination.

Example: <a href=”test.pdf” target=”_blank”>PDF Link</a>

The target attribute is used to specify where the linked document will open.

The text between the tags will be the actual link that is clicked to open the document.

Example: <a href=”test.pdf” target=”_blank”>PDF Link</a>

href=”test.pdf” - This tells it that the target document to open is the "test.pdf"

target=”_blank” - This tells it to open the PDF in a new blank page.

PDF Link - this is the text that will show up as a hyperlink on the page.

For more information on how to use an Anchor tag <a>, please refer to the link below...

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp

Method 2: Response.AddHeader

The ASP Response object is used to send output to the user from the server.

Example:

Current.Response.AddHeader("Content-Type","application/pdf")
Current.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline; filename=" + documentTitle + ".pdf")
Current.Response.BinaryWrite(PDFByteStream)
Current.Response.End()

• AddHeader method adds a new HTTP header and a value to the HTTP response.
• BinaryWrite Writes data directly to the output without any character conversion.
• End Stops processing a script, and returns the current result.

The important thing to note with this method is that the PDF must be byte[]. While this is outside the functionality of most of the ActivePDF Products (Toolkit being the exception). It is very simple to read a file in as a byte stream.

C# Example: ReadAllBytes

byte[] PDFByteStream = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(pathToPDF);

For more information on using the Response object, please refer to the link below...

https://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_ref_response.asp