Deleting Application Temp File from ASP.Net

Question

Hi,

I have a WebPage where I am giving the option to to Export the Form data to PDF. I am creating the PDF at run time and store the PDF in a "PDF" folder which is under my application directory. After creating the PDF with the SessionID name I Call following function to show the PDF file in the new browser window:

ResponseHelper.Redirect(Response, "~/PDF/" + Session.SessionID + ".pdf", "_Blank", "");

This PDF contains the private information related to the logged in user. Therefore, I want a way to delete this PDF file once it is shown in the browser to the user. This is because the IIS server allows whole development team to view this folder which is a security risk, and we can't disallow user to view this folder on the server.

Therefore, if I could delete this file as soon as it is loaded in the browser could be a solution of this security risk.

Can anyone suggest some better ways of deleting this file as soon as possbile from the application?

Thanks, Praveen

Answer 1

One way is to write an ashx handler which streams the pdf to the browser, then deletes it when done.

Another, and much better way, is to simply build the PDF in memory (NOT using session) and stream it as soon as it's ready.

UPDATE

I'm doing this with a slightly modified version of iTextSharp. Basically, iTextSharp performed all of it's operations in memory, then saved the file to disk. I changed this to return the memory stream. All the code is already there, it was really just a line or two that had to change.

Then, I used a response.binarywrite to push the stream directly to the browser. viola! no files on disk.

An ashx handler is just like an aspx page, only it has one entry point and doesn't do all of the page processing garbage. It's light weight and communicates back to the browser by response.write calls.

Answer 2

what i guess is you are creating PDF file on runtime using Itext and then you save that PDF file in temp directory to show it to user... why don't you use

Response.WriteFile(PDFFILE);

this will write the whole file on the stream without saving it in temp folder.