Product Reviews

Create Documents with Aspose.Pdf for .NET

When it's time to create a document, PDF is often the format that your users prefer. Aspose.Pdf provides the coding support that lets you build PDF documents on the fly.

About a month ago, in a ToolTracker blog post entitled "Tool Markets You Don't Even Know About", I mentioned PDF document creation as a tool market that you may not have heard of. In that market, Aspose is one of the leaders with a suite of tools for creating PDF documents.

The Aspose.Pdf document-creation tool is more than just a PDF printer driver. Aspose.Pdf allows you to build a PDF document on the fly, inserting text, tables, graphs and more as you need them.

And, unlike creating a document in Microsoft Word using automation, Aspose.Pdf does it using a set of native Microsoft .NET Framework tools -- you don't even need to have Adobe Acrobat installed on the computer.

Creating simple documents is easy with Aspose.Pdf. More importantly, from a database developer's point of view, the software lets you create data-driven templates. You define an XML template using Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) and bind it to the Aspose.Pdf document to specify the structure of your document. While you can't load a complete document from your data as you would load a grid control, slotting data into your document is easy. The Aspose.Pdf FillTable method lets you transfer data from .NET DataTables to a document table in a single statement.

I found the Aspose.Pdf object model clean and easy to understand. However, as with any document-creation system, creating complex documents can be challenging, especially if you're worried about aesthetics.

I have two criticisms, one major and one minor. First, the major complaint: Creating XSL-FO templates is key to generating data-driven reports with Aspose.Pdf. Unfortunately, Aspose.Pdf doesn't include a tool to support creating those templates -- your best strategy is to start with one of the templates included in the many sample applications provided with Aspose.Pdf and modify it. You can download the schema for XSL-FO from Aspose and use that within Visual Studio to ensure that the templates you create are valid.

Which leads to my minor criticism: While Aspose provides a full range of sample applications, they're all Visual Studio 2003/2005 projects. When I converted the sample applications to Visual Studio 2010, I had to re-reference the Aspose library and reset the application's .NET version before they would run. That took me five minutes that Aspose could have spent on its end. Still, Aspose.Pdf is a capable and easy-to-use PDF creation tool with some intriguing data-centric talents.

Aspose.Pdf

Aspose
Web: aspose.com
Phone: 888-277-6734
Price: $599 for developer Enterprise license with Standard Support
Quick Facts: Native .NET objects for creating and displaying PDF documents with Adobe Acrobat in both Web and desktop environments
Pros: Powerful data-driven tools for creating simple and complex documents on the fly
Cons: No support tools (other than a schema) for creating document templates



About the Author

Peter Vogel is a system architect and principal in PH&V Information Services. PH&V provides full-stack consulting from UX design through object modeling to database design. Peter tweets about his VSM columns with the hashtag #vogelarticles. His blog posts on user experience design can be found at http://blog.learningtree.com/tag/ui/.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

    Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

  • Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

    We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events