Question

We’re trying to create a .NET aspx page that will have a PDF within it. Doing this by hardcoding it is easy.

<object height="1250px" width="100%" type="application/pdf" data="our.pdf">
    <param value="our.pdf" name="src" />
    <param value="transparent" name="wmode" />
</object>

(don’t worry too much about the transparent thing…we’re doing that for other reasons…but I include it here “just in case”.)

The problem is when we want to generate the PDF dynamically. Our code to populate the literal on the front end looks like this:

ltrPDF.Text = String.Format("<object height=\"1250px\" width=\"100%\" type=\"application/pdf\" data=\"ourPdfGenerator.aspx?var0={0}&var1={1}&var2={2}\">", var0, var1, var2);
ltrPDF.Text += String.Format("<param value=\"ourPdfGenerator.aspx?var0={0}&var1={1}&var2={2}\">", var0, var1, var2);
ltrPDF.Text += "<param value=\"transparent\" name=\"wmode\"/>";
ltrPDF.Text += "</object>";

Kind of ugly, but it seems like it should work. But it doesn’t.

When I debug, and put a breakpoint on the first line of ourPdfGenerator.aspx.cs Page_Load method, I reach the breakpoint without any difficulty. However, the first thing we do is try to use Request.QueryString:

string var0 = Request.QueryString["var0"];

which immediately throws an HttpException: “Request is not available in this context.” I’m not clear on:

• Why isn’t it available?
• What can I do about it?

EDIT: (as an aside, I know it seems a bit weird to ask for a mime-type of pdf from a aspx page…but we’ve used an aspx page to generate cs pages before…we do something like this:

Response.Clear();
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=\"our.pdf\"");
using (MemoryStream pdfStream = new MemoryStream())
{
    ourSpecialPdfGenerator.ExportToPdf(pdfStream);
    Response.BinaryWrite(pdfStream.ToArray());
}
Response.End();

And this has been working fine in other contexts for a while…but always as its own page. What we’re doing differently now is instead of having this page called directly, we’re trying to embed it, so it’s being called from the <object> tag, which is apparently causing problems…

Answer 1

The error is in ourPdfGenerator.aspx.cs. Your object tag is fine. Can you post the code to ourPdfGenerator.aspx.cs?