Export ReportViewer Report to PDF, Excel, HTML

The following code helps exporting the Report into PDF and Excel formats using the Render method of the ServerReport. Use below code after the report is loaded (refresh() is called on the reportviewer control).

1 string mimeType;
2  string encoding;
3  string fileNameExtension;
4  Warning[] warnings;
5  string[] streamids;
6  byte[] exportBytes = reportViewer.ServerReport.Render(“PDF“, null, out mimeType, out encoding, out fileNameExtension, out streamids, out warnings);
7  HttpContext.Current.Response.Buffer = true;
8  HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
9  HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = mimeType;
10  HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader(“content-disposition“, “attachment; filename=ExportedReport.“ + fileNameExtension);
11  HttpContext.Current.Response.BinaryWrite(exportBytes);
12  HttpContext.Current.Response.Flush();
13  HttpContext.Current.Response.End();

 

To get Excel file use “Excel” as the parameter in the Render method.

Sometimes you might need to send the Report content into email. To Achieve this you can use the above code where you need to pass “HTML4.0” as the first parameter to the Render method. After you get the byte array from the Render method you can convert it to string as below

 

2  1 string mimeType;
2  string encoding;
3  Warning[] warnings;
4  string[] streamids;
5  string fileNameExtension;
6  byte[] htmlBytes = PerksReportViewer.ServerReport.Render(“HTML4.0“, null, out mimeType, out encoding, out fileNameExtension, out streamids, out warnings);
7  string reportHtml = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(htmlBytes);
8  return reportHtml;

Save HTTP 404

Once I had a call from my boss saying “Can you tell me if we have used any Favicon file in our website in any page or somewhere? As if we have used it, the file is not in place. Look at this IIS log it is full of 404s for the same file.”. And I was absolutely blank about this name. I opened the project and fired “Find in solution” but did not get any FavIcon reference.

 

Huh, a file that is not referenced anywhere in your website and still your IIS has 404 enteries? Later on I came to know that this is the file that is being shown into the address bar and in the favourites list in most browsers. More information about FavIcon can be found here.

 

And be sure to keep the Favicon file small in size to avoid high bandwidth usage, check this out on Scott’s Blog. But keep this file atleast to save 404 in your IIS log. One other file is Robots.txt that, I am not pretty sure, puts 404 in your IIS log when not found by the crawlers. You can check it out.

Safer Email Address

There are email capture programs that grabs email addresses from web pages. Even you can write one for you using the WebClient and from the ResponseText put the regular expression to capture email.

Now a days there are some tools that makes you image for your email address to make your email address safe from the above kind of programs. But the solution is when the text is controlled by you. What if you are having a Content Management Solution and people are creating pages using the HTML editors and they put email address into the editor? Or say you have a lot of email addresses to convert, its a headache.

Let us not allow the email capture programs to grab text email addresses from our websites.

Please refer to this post on my another Post on the Blogger. As the ascii encoded text in the example is not working with the HTML Editor used in the WordPress post writer.

 Happy Programming…!!!

VIEWSTATE Serialization

The most important thing for an end user of a website is the how fast the page loads and our responsibility is to make them happy.

Frequent thing to achieve this is to review the code and write the code such a way that it performs better (in terms of processing time) but what after this ?

What if we still can increase the page serving speed. Apart from the code performance it is the ISP’s speed and the size of the page that affects the download speed for a web page.

what if we can decrease the size of the page to some extent ( the size generated after the server side scripting finishes ( i mean the final rendered output)

for every server control if it’s ViewState is enabled the data is kept in a viewstate in some encoded format(base64 encoded string as everyone says.)

wo when showing a control on a page keeps data in the rendered output of control as well in the viewstate along with the

state ( previous state) information ( doubles the size of final rendered output..!!)

straighaway coming to the topic we can have this VIEWSTATE buddy help us remotely ( not being rendered with the page so by decreasing the final rendered page out put size)

This can be done keeping the VIEWSTATE in the session or keep it at the server. I am keeping it at the web server as I have got the access to the web server and I have developed one web service that deletes files(holding the VIEWSTATE on the web server) after a day. In short its upto you to write code into the SaveViewState and GetViewState methods.

try the following code snippet ( just paste it in the code behind file of your aspx page)

protected override object LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium()
{
object _objViewState;
string _strViewState;
_strViewState = GetViewState();
LosFormatter _lFormater = new LosFormatter();
try
{
//if(_strViewState!=String.Empty)
_objViewState = _lFormater.Deserialize(_strViewState);
//else
//_objViewState=”";
}
catch{
throw new HttpException(”Invalid ViewState”);
}
return _objViewState;
}
protected override void SavePageStateToPersistenceMedium(object viewState)
{
StringBuilder _sBuilder = new StringBuilder();
StringWriter _sWriter = new StringWriter(_sBuilder);
LosFormatter _lFormater = new LosFormatter();
_lFormater.Serialize(_sWriter,viewState);
_sWriter.Close();
SaveViewState(_sBuilder.ToString());
}
#region Save and Get ViewStateData
private void SaveViewState(string _vState)
{

// keep identicle files user-wise ( byadding sessionid) and page wise (for different pages by aading this.toString())
string _file = @Request.ServerVariables["APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH"]+Session.SessionID+this.ToString()+”.txt”;
FileStream _fS = new FileStream(_file,System.IO.FileMode.OpenOrCreate,System.IO.FileAccess.ReadWrite,System.IO.FileShare.ReadWrite);
StreamWriter _sW = new StreamWriter(_fS);
_sW.Write(_vState);
_sW.Close();
_fS.Close();
}
private string GetViewState()
{
string _file = @Request.ServerVariables["APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH"]+Session.SessionID+this.ToString()+”.txt”;
string _retValue=String.Empty;
if(File.Exists(_file))
{
StreamReader _sRead = new StreamReader(_file);
_retValue= _sRead.ReadToEnd();
_sRead.Close();
}
return _retValue;
}

happy programming……….

one more thing not to forget if you are using above code and storing the VIEWSTATE on web server in files.

keep a code in your Session_End in the global.asax.cs file (works when your Session State uses InProc mode) to remove the above files to keep the web-server tension free !!!