Question

I’m trying to follow this article here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211020001758/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/030911-1.aspx

I have this method in Services.asmx:

[WebMethod]
public void CreatePdf()
{
    // Create a Document object
    var document = new Document(PageSize.A4, 50, 50, 25, 25);

    // Create a new PdfWriter object, specifying the output stream
    var output = new MemoryStream();
    var writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, output);

    // Open the Document for writing
    document.Open();

    // Create a new Paragraph object with the text, "Hello, World!"
    var welcomeParagraph = new Paragraph("Hello, World!");

    // Add the Paragraph object to the document
    document.Add(welcomeParagraph);

    // Close the Document - this saves the document contents to the output stream
    document.Close();

    HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
    HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition",
        "attachment;filename=file.pdf");
    HttpContext.Current.Response.BinaryWrite(output.ToArray());        
}

And this jQuery code on my page:

$('a.download').click(function () {

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "/Services.asmx/CreatePdf",
        data: '{}',
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",
        success: function (result) {
            alert(result.d);
        }
    });
});

This is supposed to create a pdf and stream it to the user’s browser.

When I click on a link with the class download, my web method gets hit and the code runs. It just doesn’t stream the pdf to the browser.

If I look in Firebug, it posts to my method with status 200, and I get this Response:

%PDF-1.4
%����
2 0 obj
<>stream
x�+�r
�25P�04WI�2P�5��1���BҸ4>>>/Contents 2 0 R/Parent 3 0 R>>
endobj
1 0 obj
<>
endobj
3 0 obj
<>
endobj
5 0 obj
<>
endobj
6 0 obj
<>
endobj
xref
0 7
0000000000 65535 f
0000000304 00000 n
0000000015 00000 n
0000000392 00000 n
0000000147 00000 n
0000000443 00000 n
0000000488 00000 n
trailer
<<21ba8d519bb56a2d0ec514bcb9c47169>]>>
%iText-5.3.5
startxref
646
%%EOF
{“d”:null}

Am I doing something wrong here?

Answer 1

Marc B is correct. You need to have your server-side code respond with the pdf output stream.

So, point your download link to a new file, say PDFDownload.aspx, and place the code from your CreatePdf function in the PageLoad of PDFDownload.aspx.cs.