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Home » Newsletter » December 2015

It is bizarre how much time and expense is devoted to create documents and then limiting access to it. An oft-asked question on stackoverflow.com and other forums is how to display a document without saving to disk.

If it is a "Windows Forms Application" (now called "Classic Desktop"), then a WinForms document viewer that can load from a byte array or a stream would do.

With the PDF viewer in PDFOne .NET, the code can look like this:

try {
  FileStream oFS = File.OpenRead(@"top-secret.pdf");
  byte[] baPDF = new byte[oFS.Length];

  oFS.Read(baPDF, 0, Convert.ToInt32(oFS.Length));

  pdfViewer1.LoadDocument(baPDF);
} catch (Exception err) {
  MessageBox.Show(err.Message);
}

When the document is available or is generated on the server, then developers want the documents to be displayed in a browser but not be downloadable, at least not as the original PDF file. In such cases, the download button in the toolbar of the PDF "Web" viewer component needs to be disabled. Similarly, the print function can also be disabled.

PDFViewer1.ToolBar.SavePage.Visible = false;
PDFViewer1.ToolBar.PrintPage.Visible = false;
PDFViewer1.LoadDocument(Server.MapPath(".") + "\\App_Data\\secret-decoder.pdf");