PdfSharp / MigraDoc to Azure Storage in-memory upload
17 Oct, 2015
From my (somewhat limited) experience PdfSharp / MigraDoc seems like a pretty fine and powerful library for creating .pdf documents, but it’s documentation - not so much. It’s a bit all over the place and with multiple different NuGet versions/builds and outdated StackOverflow code samples not really helping the situation.
However, creating a .pdf document in-memory and uploading it straight to Azure is not really that complicated. When might this be useful? For example when you need to generate a report but instead of immediately giving it to the user it just needs to get stored for later access.
Magic word we’re looking for is MemoryStream. We’ll use two classes - one which will take a MemoryStream and upload it to Azure (AzureProvider.cs), and another one which will create a very simple MigraDoc document (ReportProvider.cs) which you can then build upon and then feed that document to the AzureProvider in the form of MemoryStream.
The code is pretty straightforward and looks like this:
// AzureProvider.cs
using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;
namespace MyApp.Providers
{
public class AzureProvider
{
public async Task<string> UploadStreamToAzure(string containerName, string fileName, MemoryStream stream)
{
var blockBlob = ResolveCloudBlockBlob(containerName, fileName);
await blockBlob.UploadFromStreamAsync(stream);
return fileName;
}
public CloudBlockBlob ResolveCloudBlockBlob(string containerName, string fileName)
{
var container = ResolveCloudBlobContainer(containerName);
var blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(fileName);
return blockBlob;
}
public CloudBlobContainer ResolveCloudBlobContainer(string containerName)
{
var storageAccount = GetCloudStorageAccount();
var blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
var container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(containerName);
return container;
}
private CloudStorageAccount GetCloudStorageAccount()
{
return CloudStorageAccount.Parse(ResolveAzureStorageConnectionString());
}
public string ResolveAzureStorageConnectionString()
{
var accountName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Azure.Storage.AccountName"]; // Get account name from web.config
var accessKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Azure.Storage.PrimaryAccessKey"]; // Get primary access key from web.config
return String.Format("DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName={0};AccountKey={1}", accountName, accessKey);
}
}
}// ReportProvider.cs
using System.IO;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using MigraDoc.DocumentObjectModel;
using MigraDoc.Rendering;
using PdfSharp.Pdf;
namespace MyApp.Providers
{
public class ReportProvider
{
protected AzureProvider _azureProvider;
public ReportProvider()
{
_azureProvider = new AzureProvider();
}
public async Task<string> CreateReport()
{
var document = CreateDocument();
var containerName = "democontainer";
var fileName = "demodocument.pdf";
var stream = ConvertMemDocToMemoryStream(document);
return await _azureProvider.UploadStreamToAzure(containerName, fileName, stream);
}
private Document CreateDocument()
{
Document document = new Document();
var section = document.AddSection();
var paragraph = section.AddParagraph("Report Demo");
// Add other document elements here
return document;
}
protected static MemoryStream ConvertMemDocToMemoryStream(Document document)
{
PdfDocumentRenderer pdfRenderer = new PdfDocumentRenderer(false, PdfFontEmbedding.Always);
pdfRenderer.Document = document;
pdfRenderer.RenderDocument();
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
pdfRenderer.PdfDocument.Save(stream, false);
return stream;
}
}
}Somewhat related - in the next post I’ll explain how to stream a file from Azure Storage private container through .net WebAPI to an AngularJS app.
