generating reports using custom data (html table) not dataset

Question

i read several articles on this site and many others recommending report generating tools of various kinds but all use dataset as there datasource

this is not my requirement!

i need some way to export the data which is displayed in the htmltable on mypage.aspx

• user clicks view record
• a pdf opens (it should contain the data of the html table which is made dynamically)

help please

"generating pdf on the fly using a htmltable as a source of data and displaying it a a pdf doc in the browser but NOT SAVING THE RESULT ON THE SERVER"

Answer 1

You may take a look at iTextSharp and here's a tutorial on how to get started. There's also a section in the documentation which illustrates how to create tables in PDF documents.

Answer 2

Check out this thread regarding abcPDF. What you are describing is very similar to what I have used their library for. When I was originally testing out various methods, I had tried iTextSharp but found for the very minimal cost, abcPDF did everything that I required (sepcifically HTML to PDF generation) with minimal lines of code.

Generation PDF from HTML (component for .NET)