1. Introduction
In the company I’m currently working for, it is a common practice to use Devexpress XtraReports to create all kind of reports. Usually these reports are embedded into html page and used along with DevexpressReportViewer. However, lately I have been asked to open a report as a PDF file, without putting a viewer into a html page.
2. First approach
After some digging, I created an action in controller which looks like this
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public void ExportToPdf() { using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) { var testReport = new TestReport(); testReport.CreateDocument(); testReport.ExportToPdf(stream); Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = "application/pdf" Response.BinaryWrite(stream.ToArray()); } } |
In the first step I made a new instance of a devexpress report(TestReport), then I called a method CreateDocument which is responsible for creating a content of report. Having prepared the report, I could use the ExportToPdf function which creates a stream in a PDF format. In the last step, I cleared Response property and added an array of bytes into it. I also had to change Response.ContentType to “application/pdf” in order to inform a browser that I’m sending a pdf file.
3. Second approach – custom ActionResult
The solution presented above works fine, however, I wanted to create something more reusable, that is why I decided to create a custom ActionResult – PDFActionResult. In order to create my own ActionResult, I created a PDFActionResult class which inherits from an abstract ActionResult class.
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public class PDFActionResult : ActionResult { private readonly byte[] _byteArray; private const string ContentType = "application/pdf"; public PDFActionResult(byte[] byteArray) { _byteArray = byteArray; } public PDFActionResult(XtraReport report) { using(MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) { report.CreateDocument(); report.ExportToPdf(stream); _byteArray = stream.ToArray(); } } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { var response = context.HttpContext.Response; response.Clear(); response.ContentType = ContentType; response.BinaryWrite(_byteArray); } } |
As you can see, all logic from the ExportToPdf action was transferred to the PDFActionResult class. Now, all you have to do to return Pdf from DevexpressReport is to return the PDFActionResult from your controller action.
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public PDFActionResult ExportToPdfUsingCustomResult() { var testReport = new TestReport(); return new PDFActionResult(testReport); } |
Source code for this post can be found here