Question

I’m using a expertPDF to convert a couple webpages to PDF, and there’s one that i’m having difficulties with. This page only renders content when info is POST’d to it, and the content is text and a PNG graph (the graph is the most important piece).

I tried creating a page form with a ‘auto submit’ on the body onload='' event. If i go to this page, it auto posts to the 3rd party page and i get the page as i expect. But it appears ExpertPDF won’t take a ‘snapshot’ if the page is redirected.

I tried using HTTPRequest/Response and WebClient, but have only been able to retrieve the HTML, which doesn’t include the PNG graph.
Any idea how i can create a memorystream that includes the HTML AND the PNG graph or post to it, but then somehow send ExpertPDF to that URL to take a snapshot of the posted results?

Help is greatly appreciated – i’ve spent too much time trying on this one sniff.
Thanks!

Answer 1

In HTML/HTTP the web page (the HTML) is a separate resource from any images it includes. So you would need to parse the HTML and find the URL that points to your graph, and then make a second request to that URL to get the image. (This is unless the page spits the image out inline, which is pretty rare, and if that were the case you probably wouldn’t be asking.)

A quick look at ExpertPDF’s FAQ page, there’s a FAQ question that deals specifically with your problem. I would recommend you take a look at that.

** UPDATE **

Take a look at the second FAQ question:

Q: When I convert a HTML string to PDF, the external CSS files and images are not applied in the rendered PDF document.

You can take the original (single) response from your WebClient and convert that into a string and pass that string to ExpertPDF based on the answer to that question.