PDFOne .NET

asp:review

PDFOne .NET

Lightweight, but Powerful

By Anand Narayanaswamy

Imagine you are in the process of developing a billing application for a large corporation. There will be a requirement to generate invoices in PDF format as and when a client successfully completes the payment. The whole process is to be completed on the server side during run time. Hence, it is not technically feasible to make use of PDF software to perform the relevant task. In this scenario, you should employ component libraries that will be able to create PDF documents with the help of codes.

PDFOne .NET (http://www.gnostice.com/PdfOneNETOverview.asp), a powerful product developed by India-based Gnostice Technologies, provides a rich set of Application Programming Interfaces to create and manipulate PDF documents. I put to the test the preview edition of version 2.0 under Windows XP Professional SP2 with Visual Studio 2005. The installation process was pretty easy and I managed to work with the product after going through the step-by-step instructions given in the getting started guide.

The main feature of the product is its ability to quickly create, generate, and manipulate PDF documents with only a few lines of code. It has the built-in functionality to load data from file and memory stream, and can be used with Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications. Some of the other core features of the product include compression, encryption, TrueType fonts, font embedding, support for international characters, and bookmarks. Moreover, the component ships with a wide range of annotation, such as Text, Link, FreeText, Line, Square, Circle, Highlight, Underline, Squiggly, StrikeOut, Stamp, and Ink.

The product enables you to design fully formatted PDF forms with buttons, checkboxes, listboxes, and JavaScript actions.

It is also possible to populate the forms with data from any data store. I found that the component includes support for advanced drawing functions, which helps you draw tables and paragraphs with a single method call. You also can use the product to develop applications that need the functionality to automatically e-mail the generated PDF file to the client. This feature should be useful to develop compelling Web applications. A complete list of all the features included with the product can be viewed athttp://www.gnostice.com/PDFOneNETfeatures.asp.

A form appears inside a PDF form within the browser, and can be created with only few lines of code:

PDFFormTextField txtFld = new PDFFormTextField();

txtFld.Rectangle = new RectangleF(3, 1, 1.6f, 0.25f);

txtFld.FieldValue = "Enter Name";

txtFld.ToolTip = "Enter Your Name Here";

txtFld.FieldName = "txtName";

txtFld.BorderColor = Color.Black;

txtFld.NameAsUnicode = false;

doc.AddFormField(txtFld);

Listing 1: Creation of TextField.

PDFFormListBox lstBox = new PDFFormListBox();

lstBox.Rectangle = new RectangleF(3, 2, 0.6f, 0.5f);

lstBox.AddItem("India");

lstBox.AddItem("Germany");

lstBox.AddItem("Russia");

lstBox.SelectedItemIndex = 0;

lstBox.FieldName = "lstCountry";

lstBox.NameAsUnicode = false;

lstBox.BorderColor = Color.Black;

doc.AddFormField(lstBox);

Listing 2: Creation of ListBox.

The vendor provides a sample Windows Forms application that enables you to visualize all the features of the product under a single project. However, the application is created using Visual Studio .NET 2003 version and I converted it using Visual Studio 2005 to work with it. I would suggest the vendor provide a sample application that demonstrates the use of the product in a Web-based environment. However, I found that the vendor has posted an interesting article on their Web site that examines how to make use of the product to build ASP.NET applications (http://www.gnostice.com/nl_article.asp?id=125&t=How_To_Generate_PDF_Forms_In_ASP.NET).

The product includes separate documentation for developers and end-users. The developer guide contains step-by-step tutorials of each feature, with the help of a sample Windows application. I would suggest the vendor combine two separate documentation files into a single file with more tutorials and namespace reference information.

The latest release comes with a PDF viewer and printer component. While the viewer is a GUI component used to view PDF documents in Windows applications, the printer component is a set of libraries that enables developers to write code to print PDF documents. The vendor is slated to release another release of the product with more features later this year.

I found that the product is pretty lightweight and contains tons of interesting features.

Rating:

Web Site:http://www.gnostice.com

Price: US$649

Anand Narayanaswamy, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) works as an independent consultant based in Trivandrum, India. Anand also works as chief technical editor forhttp://ASPAlliance.com. He is the author of Community Server Quickly published by Packt Publishing (http://www.packtpub.com/community-server/book). He runshttp://Learnxpress.com,http://Dotnetalbum.com,http://Csharpfaq.com,http://www.computerbookreviews.org, andhttp://www.devreviews.com. Find out more about Anand athttp://www.visualanand.net or e-mail him atmailto:[email protected].