Flex: Printing PDFs

Question

Up until now I have found several solutions for generating PDFs including AlivePDF and Jasper. Now they work in the way that they generate a PDF and the user can save it.

The main issue that I am facing is that when you implement a download method after the user choses the path where to save it, the file gets saved, and that is it... there is no "Open with..." popup or something similar like in browsers where a user can directly open that file with a reader. In this case after the file gets saved the user has to navigate from my application and dive on his hard drive to find the saved file and open it.

Is there a way I can generate and open a PDF directly from my flex application running Flash? so the users sees the file directly.

Answer 1

Yes, you can use FlexPaper - a pdf viewer.

So, when the PDF is ready on the server, don't offer it for download - stream it "silently" to the flex client, and display it. And then you can have a "Save" button so that the user can download it.