Hi.

I need to create PDF files in a module I'm developing, I remember there use to be a PDF creation feature in past versions of DNN, similar to the "print" button you could hide/show as part of the container, but for version 5.6.1 that button is not available anymore. Can you tell me if that feature is still available? I want to try it by myself before purchasing an add-on.

Thanks!

I have added PDF support to one of my modules -- this is not easy.  Depends on what you are looking to do.  My SQLGridSelectedView module allow the user to export the resulting grid to PDF. -- but I only support a handful of fonts, and predefined the look of the PDF page generated.  To do this, I had to implement a limited PDF document generation library into my module.  This took signicant effort to debug the routines as the PDF specificiation is very demanding.  

I have been working with DNN since V2 and DNN has never supported PDF in any version that I am aware of, so you are possibly thinking of a third part module that implemented a Page capture display using PDF.  This would typically use a third party library to capture and render the page.  Such libraries are not cheap and many have restrictive licences as the libraries are expensive to develop. 

You need to determine what exactly you want to generate as PDF.  Adding the iTextSharp library (it's free) as a dependency to your site is doable, but to create a generic PDF page print module, will require many hours of development using such as library. 

If you have a need to generate PDF reports -- consider SQL report writer.  There are several modules that will launch the saved reports.

Hopes this help you understand why DotNetNuke does not support PDF out of the box,
Paul

If you are looking to just generate a pdf of a report - say for example to replicate content that are are displaying using a dnngrid - then you can bypass most of the complex pdf issues by just using the built in export to pdf features that part of the radgrid which is the basis for dnngrid.

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/...

This works pretty well for most of our client needs - and also does export to excel and csv as well.

Alternatively - if you need to do a custom pdf layout - have a look at textsharp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/itext...  - it lets you create pdfs dynamically - and also manipulate the contents of existing pdfs.

Westa