Question

Simply put, I’d like someone to be able to click a link, and get a one-time-use pdf. We have the library to create PDF files, so that’s not an issue.

We could generate a link to an aspx page, have that page generate the pdf, save the pdf to the filesystem, and then Response.Redirect to the saved pdf. Then we’d somehow have to keep track of and clean up the PDF file.

Since we don’t ever need to keep this data, what I’d like to do instead, if possible, is to have the aspx page generate the pdf, and serve it directly back as a response to the original request. Is this possible?

(In our case, we’re using C#, and we want to serve a pdf back, but it seems like any solution would probably work for various .NET languages and returned filetypes.)

Answer 1

Assuming you can get a byte[] representing your PDF:

Response.Clear();
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition",
    "attachment;filename=\"FileName.pdf\"");

Response.BinaryWrite(yourPdfAsByteArray);

Response.Flush();

Response.End();