PDFOne .NET
Powerful all-in-one PDF library for .NET

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VS 2005/2008/2010/2012/2013

Home » Newsletter » December 2006

By Shijin C. A. and M. V. Niranjan

XML is a great way for enabling data interchange. PDF offers a great way for presenting data.

That brings us to the point of how to take data from XML and present it in PDF. PDFOne .NET provides a very simple method to read XML data and render it in PDF files.

In this article, you will see a project that converts XML data to PDF.

Specifically, PDFOne .NET supports place holders in text strings that are written to PDF documents. Users can define their own place holders and then supply the values from XML through an event.

This project supplies data stored in XML nodes through place holders. The main method Button1_Click renders the PDF document. The GetXmlData method supplies the value for the place holders.

GetXmlData gets data through XmlTextReader in case of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005^®. (Visual Studio 2005 has all the methods necessary for reading values of each node.)

using Gnostice.PDFOne;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
// Creates a string containing XML-formatted data
static string xmlString =
    "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>" +
    "<myfile>" +
    "<record><name>Rita</name><age>23</age>" +
    "<gender>female</gender></record>" +
    "<record><name>Bob</name><age>25</age>" +
    "<gender>male</gender></record>" +
    "<record><name>Sam</name><age>32</age>" +
    "<gender>male</gender></record>" +
    "<record><name>Julie</name><age>20</age>" +
    "<gender>female</gender></record>" +
    "</myfile>";
// Creates an xml text reader objct for reading the
// xml input data
XmlTextReader textReader =
    new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(xmlString));
private void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  PDFDocument doc = new PDFDocument();
  // Fills the variables with data (performed
  // by the delegate under this method)
  doc.ReplaceVariable +=
       new ReplaceVariableEventHandler(GetXMLData);
  ...
  for (i = 0; i < noOfRecords; i++, yLocation += 0.4f)
  {
    doc.WriteText("Name", 1, yLocation);
    // Replaces placeholder <%name%> with value read from
    // the XML string
    doc.WriteText("<%name%>", 2, yLocation);
    yLocation += 0.2f;
    doc.WriteText("Age", 1, yLocation);
    // Replaces placeholder <%age%> with value read from
    // the XML string
    doc.WriteText("<%age%>", 2, yLocation);
    yLocation += 0.2f;
    doc.WriteText("Gender", 1, yLocation);
    // Replaces placeholder <%gender%> with value read from
    // the XML string
    doc.WriteText("<%gender%>", 2, yLocation);
  }
  ...
}
void GetXMLData(object sender,
                string variable,
                ref string newValue,
                ref bool replace)
{
  textReader.ReadToFollowing(variable);
  newValue = textReader.ReadString();
}

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Downloads:

• Zipped C# Project files. Please note that for users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2003^®, the function GetData is used (not shown here but included in this project), which fetches data manually.