How do I host PDF content on a webpage that also is capable of running javascript? ASP.Net solutions please.

Question

Hello chaps, first question so be gentle with me and thanks in advance for your help!

I'm going to add quite a bit of context to explain why I'm asking the question I am and why I want to do what I want to do. Bear with me, it'll all be worth it.

I should mention that this app will not be seen by the general public and we have some contraints on our users (only use IE 5.5, that sort of thing).

I have an existing web app that I'm having to add to.

Currently an aspx page is navigated to with some IDs passed in as a query string and in the page load a call is made to a business object, passing in the page's Response object. That business object grabs PDF byte content (from a sql server via a business object) and, having set the necessaries in the header, writes the PDF byte data into the Response object. The user gets to see the PDF and all is right with the world.

Howewver, now we have a requirement that when the page is navigated to the app will get the PDF byte data and in addition to displaying it we'll send it to a proprietary system based local to the web client (we already do this via a java applet other points in the application's workflow and it works).

Thing is, I need to (depending on some user settings or other) show a modal dialog when the user navigates to the 'view dynamicallly generated pdf document' page, to ask if the user wants to szend the PDF to this proprietary system. For this I need to be able to run client-side javascript to call showModalDialog (using showModalDialog is handy because I can put all the java applet calling stuff and the java applet itself on this one page that gets shown as a modal dialog).

Problem is the way we show our PDF at the moment doesn't allow us to run javascript as all that gets sent down to the client is a page with a bunch of pdf data and marked as such.

So far I've trieed IFrames (yeah, yeah I kow, effluent from Lucifer's fundament) with the src being dynamically set to the url of the PDF display page plus the querystring that page needs. That worked in the sense that I got my modal dialog showing which was great and the PDF displayed (which was something at least) in a cosy little two inches at the top of the page, which was not so great :(

I've also tried using an object tag but I don't even know where to start getting that sorted to 'runat=server'. When I try to do it client side I get object required errors in my java script.

So all I really want is some kind of 'container' that I can place on a standard aspx page, that I can use to dynamically reference another page from which will give it 'full height' in the viewport. IFrames seemed like that fella but they seem to be a bit...well...poo.

Oh and just in case you didn't guess: I'm not as experienced a web dev as I am in WinForms.

Answer 1

please try something like this:

<form id="form1" runat="server"> <div style="width:99%;height:99%;border:1px solid green;"> <iframe id="frame1" runat="server" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="Userguide.pdf" style="height:99.5%;width:99.5%;border:1px solid yellow;"></iframe>> </div> </form>

Answer 2

That worked in the sense that I got my modal dialog showing which was great and the PDF displayed (which was something at least) in a cosy little two inches at the top of the page

Then give the iframe a bigger height. Either through the ‘height’ attribute, if you can guess a reasonable size in pixels, or using CSS if you want to do something like basing it on page height:

<iframe src="pdfscript?id=123" style="position: absolute; top: 10%; left: 10%; width: 80%; height: 80%;"></iframe>

Whilst you can embed a PDF in a web page using the <object> tag, it's strongly not recommended. At least with the iframe option, if you don't have a PDF plugin installed it will prompt you to download as a file; the object-version will just give you a broken plugin icon and maybe prompt you to install the Acrobat plugin.

(And you definitely don't want the Acrobat plugin installed, because of all the security holes that are currently delivering control of our desktops to Russian hackers. Thanks Adobe.)

Answer 3

Thanks guys I'll try that tomorrow.