Hi Stephen,
Is the Report and ASPX page in the same application? If so you might want to
look into just calling Server.Execute() to execute the page which allows you
to run the page and pass in your own HTMLTextWriter() and then retrieve the
result.
Something like this:
public static string AspTextMerge(string TemplatePageAndQueryString,ref
string ErrorMessage)
{
string MergedText = "";
// *** Save the current request information
HttpContext Context = HttpContext.Current;
// *** Fix up the path to point at the templates directory
TemplatePageAndQueryString = Context.Request.ApplicationPath +
"/templates/" + TemplatePageAndQueryString;
// *** Now call the other page and load into StringWriter
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
try
{
Context.Server.Execute(TemplatePageAndQueryString,sw);
MergedText = sw.ToString();
}
catch
{
MergedText = null;
}
return MergedText;
}
FWIW, using an HTTP request is not much slower in this situation - the above
code also requires a fair amount of overhead as ASP.Net has to perform some
fixup to 'fake' this request through Execute. I've used HTTP in a number of
situations with good results - your only concern will be not tying up the
ASP.Net thread for too long waiting for the report to finish - if that's the
case you may have to do this asynchronously...
+++ Rick ---
--
Rick Strahl
West Wind Technologies
http://www.west-wind.com/ http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/ ----------------------------------
Making waves on the Web
[quoted text, click to view] "Stephen Miller" <jsausten@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:cdb404de.0402082351.6b3fde3f@posting.google.com...
> I have an ASPX report and I want to capture the rendered HTML and
> write to a file on the webserver. Several posts suggest using
> WebRequest to make a second call to the page, and screen-scrape the
> resulting HTML. The technique typically described is:
>
> '-- Get the current URL and request page
> Dim url As String =
> System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri
> Dim req As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(url)
>
> Dim result As System.Net.WebResponse = req.GetResponse()
> Dim ReceiveStream As Stream = result.GetResponseStream()
>
> Dim read() As Byte = New Byte(512) {}
> Dim bytes As Integer = ReceiveStream.Read(read, 0, 512)
>
> '-- Read contents and append to StringBuilder
> Dim sbPage As New System.Text.StringBuilder()
> While (bytes > 0)
> Dim encode As System.Text.Encoding =
> System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8")
> sbPage.Append(encode.GetString(read, 0, bytes))
> bytes = ReceiveStream.Read(read, 0, 512)
> End While
>
> My problem is that
> Firstly, doesn't this necessitate a second round trip to the server
> adding performance overheads?
> Secondly, my report is password protected (authentication mode is
> Forms) and this technique redirects to the designated login form.
>
> Is there another way to get a string representation of the rendered
> HTML? I have been fooling around with the OutputStream without any
> luck.
>
>
> As a side note, writing the HTML to file is part of a dodgy workaround
> that shells to a DOS program and converts the resulting HTML to PDF
> format, prior to flushing the current response and sending the PDF
> instead. I have looked at dozens of commercial products but haven't
> found one that can convert the rendered ASPX page to PDF on the fly
> (allowing me to provide all report layout in ASPX mark-up). Is anyone
> aware of a commercial product that can resultant do this?
>
> I know SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services has just become available,
> but I don't have VS2003.
>
> Regards,
>
> Stephen
