Saving an MVC View to PDF - html

Question

As the title suggests, I am looking for a way to export a .NET MVC View to a PDF.
My program works like this:
Page 1
Takes in information
Page 2
Takes this information and heavily styles it with CSS etc
So basically I need to save page 2 after it has been processed and used the information from Page 1's model.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

To render a non-static page to a pdf, you need to render the page to a string, using a ViewModel, and then convert to a pdf:
Firstly, create a method RenderViewToString in a static class, that can be referenced in a Controller:
public static class StringUtilities
{
public static string RenderViewToString(ControllerContext context, string viewPath, object model = null, bool partial = false)
{
// first find the ViewEngine for this view
ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null;
if (partial)
{
viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(context, viewPath);
}
else
{
viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(context, viewPath, null);
}
if (viewEngineResult == null)
{
throw new FileNotFoundException("View cannot be found.");
}
// get the view and attach the model to view data
var view = viewEngineResult.View;
context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model;
string result = null;
using (var sw = new StringWriter())
{
var ctx = new ViewContext(context, view, context.Controller.ViewData, context.Controller.TempData, sw);
view.Render(ctx, sw);
result = sw.ToString();
}
return result.Trim();
}
}
Then, in your Controller:
var viewModel = new YourViewModelName
{
// Assign ViewModel values
}
// Render the View to a string using the Method defined above
var viewToString = StringUtilities.RenderViewToString(ControllerContext, "~/Views/PathToView/ViewToRender.cshtml", viewModel, true);
You then have the view, generated by a ViewModel, as a string that can be converted to a pdf, using one of the libraries out there.
Hope it helps, or at least sets you on the way.