Converting ASP.NET Repeater HTML to PDF using iTextSharp

Step by step implementation of iTextSharp to convert repeater controls HTML to PDF

Create a Webpage with repeater control

Follow the article Repeater control with custom paging to create aspx page with repeater control.

Export Customers

Add a button control to the aspx page created in the previous step. The functionality for this button would be to export details of customers displayed on the current page. The page has the feature of paging so only customers shown for the current page will be export to PDF using iTextSharp dll.

iTextSharp.text.html.simpleparser.HTMLWorker has method Parse which parses string to HTML.

Repeater control's method RenderControl gives us the required HTML for parsing and with the help of Response objects methods and properties you can convert the HTML to PDF.

Add the below code for btnExport click event.

    
protected void btnPDF_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
    Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", 
        "attachment;filename=Customers.pdf");
    Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);
            
    //this.Page.RenderControl(hw);            
    this.repCustomers.RenderControl(hw);
    StringReader sr = new StringReader
        (sw.ToString().Replace("\r", "")
        .Replace("\n", "").Replace("  ", ""));
    
    Document pdfDoc = 
        new Document(iTextSharp.text.PageSize.A4,
                     10f, 10f, 10f, 0.0f);

    HTMLWorker htmlparser = new HTMLWorker(pdfDoc);
    PdfWriter.GetInstance(pdfDoc, Response.OutputStream);
    pdfDoc.Open();
    htmlparser.Parse(sr);
    pdfDoc.Close();
    Response.Write(pdfDoc);
    Response.End();
}       
            

Export All Customers

Add a button to the aspx page for converting all customers' HTML to PDF.

Due to paging, at any given time you will have only customers that are displayed for current page index. So you will have to create a new Repeater control and bind it to all customers using C# code.

Replace below code with this.repCustomers.RenderControl(hw); from the previous step and add it for btnExportAllCustomer_Click event;

It uses the RenderControl method of new repeater control.

Repeater repAllCustomers = this.repCustomers;

repAllCustomers.DataSource = 
    CustomerService.GetAllCustomers
        (0, CustomerService.GetCustomerCount());
    
repAllCustomers.DataBind();
repAllCustomers.RenderControl(hw); 
    
            

It converts the structure of existing repeater repCustomers control and binds to all customers which are in the Northwind database.

Convert entire Webpage HTML to PDF

If you want to convert the Webpage's entire HTML to PDF using iTextSharp. Use this.Page.RenderControl(hw); instead of using repAllCustomers.RenderControl.

Whenever you convert HTML to PDF make sure all the links to images, other webpages are accessible or relative addresses used to link.

Export this repeater html to Excel

Source Code on Github