Question

I’m currently using an html embed tag to display a pdf file that is saved on the local server. Is there a wayo to display a pdf file on my page without having to save it to the local file system of the server? I just wand to pass it to the view from the controller in such a way that it can be displayed as a pdf in the page without having it stored on the file system directly.

Alternatively, is there a way to call a method to delete the pdf file from the server once the user has navigated away from the page they are viewing? How do I tell if th euser has navicated away from the page and how do i cause that to trigger a method that will delete the file?

Answer 1

I created a MVC class called PdfResult that returns a byte array as a PDF file.

The purpose is as follows (can’t upload the source code, sorry):

1. PdfResult inherits from FileStreamResult
2. Set the Content-Type header to application/pdf
3. Set the Content-Disposition to either attachment or inline, and set an appropriate file name
4. Convert your data to a Stream — if your data is a byte array, then write it to a MemoryStream.

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/16673120/272072 for a good example of how to do this.

Then, your embed code just needs to point to the action method, as if it was a PDF file.
Here’s an example:

public ActionResult ShowPdf() {
    // Note: the view should contain a tag like <embed src='MyController/GetPdf'>
    return View(); 
}

public ActionResult GetPdf() {
    byte[] pdfBytes = dataRepo.GetPdf(...);
    return new PdfResult(pdfBytes, "Filename.pdf", false) ;
}