Question

My project is almost done, and thanks to stackoverflow. Now that I have managed to capture Users details and their certificates, I am looking for a way to generate pdf which I will send to those who passed.

I am not looking for the code at the moment. I have an asp.net mvc 3 application which shows Certificates details for my students. Now I want the certificates to be generated then sent by email, all this automated.

First I would like help on how I can generate a pdf from database values and sending the generated pdf wont be a problem.

Answer 1

Using iTextSharp, this code will create and serve a PDF:

public FileStreamResult DownloadPDF()
{
        MemoryStream workStream = new MemoryStream();

        using(Document document = new Document())
        {
            PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, workStream).CloseStream = false;

            document.Open();

            document.SetPageSize(PageSize.LETTER);
            document.SetMargins(12, 12, 8, 7);
            document.NewPage();

            // 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);

            // This is where your data would go

            document.Close();
        }
        workStream.Position = 0;

        FileStreamResult fileResult = new FileStreamResult(workStream, "application/pdf");
        fileResult.FileDownloadName = "test.pdf";

        return fileResult;
    }

For more information see Creating PDF Documents with ASP.NET and iTextSharp

There are a lot of tutorials online, but this should get you started.