I am trying to create an app that will be able to display a pdf file in the app itself. I'm currently using the Xamarin.Bindings.PDFView-Android by SIDOVSKY which works really nicely. I can open a file easily from the assets... what I'm struggling to do is open a file from the internet.
Just a single line of code:
FindViewById<PDFView>(Resource.Id.pdf_view).FromAsset("report.pdf").Show();
Is enough to display a PDF that can be pinched to zoom which is great. However, I now want to access a file stored on the local network. Either using a SMB share, or through the intranet. Whichever way I try I can't figure it out.
There is a .FromFile setting, but I can't get it to work by putting a smb path in here. Is there a way to convert this? Or must I download the file to the local device first?
Thanks
Andrew
Related
I have a URL which points to some PDF file. The thing I want to achieve is to share it with some app. Sharing not a link, but the PDF file itself. The question is how to achieve this? With my investigation I came to the following conclusion:
Download it using Retrofit
Save it inside device
Get somehow the path of the file and share it
Is it correct path to solve the problem? Maybe there are other, more easy solutions?
The core part of my application is load PDF online and user have access to download it as per their given rights.
The problem I am facing is that I want to load pdf online. After many research I have found that,
There are likely two ways to show pdf online in android:
1) In Web view by loading simple hosted URL
2) By google doc.
But in our case, if we use way (1), the mobile web view does not redirect hosted url of PDF.
And if we use way (2), then there are certain limitations of the google docs regarding the file sizes. (Small pdf it will load like 5 to 10 with size of 1MB)
But after loading PDF with the size of 2 or 3 MB it's also giving me error as "No PREVIEW AVAILABLE" and its continuously giving me this error opening different urls.
So it seems there is still no easy solution for viewing a pdf from url (online without downloading pdf).
The other way to open pdf online is that we can open it in any other third party applications like browser, adobe pdf reader or any kind of pdf viewer application available in the device.
Cons: If we open pdf in browser then it will get downloaded automatically and if we open it in any third party application then they have options to download the pdf.
Please give me some solution to read the PDF online.
And if there are any paid pdf SDK availble which gives functionality of loading pdf online from URL, then please provide information of that too.
Please also suggest me some pdf viewer library for displaying pdf online.
I have used many of the library, but it increases my application's size to 8 to 10 MB.
Thanks in advance.
The suggested primary solution,
Download the file, store it in the app specific folder so users don't have access. For viewers who don't have access rights to download it, you will delete the file as they leave the view. For viewers who have access rights to download it, they will be given an option to copy the file to their SD card (an accessible location) and then you will delete the original file as they leave the view.
For storing in app specific directory to restrict user access,
http://www.grokkingandroid.com/how-to-correctly-store-app-specific-files-in-android/
Also use a library to view the pdf(MUCH SIMPLER), choose an appropriate one from here
https://android-arsenal.com/search?q=pdf
Alternate solution,
If security is a major concern, you can encrypt the pdf file and store it on the server. And decrypt the file when you download it to the device.
For added security, don't store the file as pdf, just store it as a file. Download it as a file. Set type as pdf when you want to access it.
Conclusion,
Data wise, Even if you load it online, the device will consume almost same data as downloading the pdf. (Infact for viewing something online, your device downloads the data and stores it in the cache and you can view it)
Security wise, only a rooted phone will be able to access the file but that too for as long as you have decided to store it.
I suggest you check out PDF.js, a Javascript library from Mozilla to render PDF's in a browser. You can adapt this into a WebView easily, and display PDF's without downloading them.
Here is an open source app which does something similar to what you're looking for
I'm looking for a way to display a pdf that is loaded in a webview.
The case is as follows:
- We load a (external) web application inside a webview.
- The web application is secured, users have to login to access their data.
- When the user has logged in there is a button for downloading a pdf file.
- On iOS the pdf file is being displayed inside the webview, on Android it isn't.
- It is not possible to access the pdf by using a webservice instead of the webview (so, Titanium.Network.HTTPClient cannot be used)
We tried several solutions that we found on the internet. Unfortunately, till now without any success.
We tried:
- Google's documentviewer: http://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=. This is not working because the pdf is 'behind' a username/password. Google is not aware of the session.
- Saving the pdf to the local file system and open it with Android Intent. We did not succeed in saving the pdf on the local filesystem.
The last option (saving the pdf and open it by using Ti.Android.Intent) seems to be the best option. But is it possible to save a pdf from a webview???
Maybe an external module (or using pdf.js) is also an option.
Can someone point me in the right direction.
We even don't know if what we want is possible?
Any help is really appreciated.
Stefan.
I already shown a PDF file in android device. But I need to scribble (writing with my finger) in that PDF page and I need to save the changes with existing PDF file itself in the sdcard. I searched so many source codes but i can't get what i am expected. Could you anyone help me on this. Thanks.
The question I have is simple but hard to put in words, I'll give it a try anyways.
I am trying to load a web page in webview. However, the load time is a little bit too high.
Is there any way I can put the images in the assets folder and load them from there instead?
If not, is there a way I can load the whole site from the assets folder, providing that my PHP files can still communicate with my internet database?
I have already read most tutorials, but those are pretty vague when it comes to concrete help.
try this... WebView with custom HTML and local images
There is no way to store your php files on the device itself. They need a server to execute them and sent the result to the device if the are on the device you would just show the php code to your webview and that would certainly not work.
The Webview should be able to cache some of the images itself. But it seems that there is no way to access images from the sd card or the internal storage from your webview.
Maybe it is possible to store some of your data through html5 local storage apis but I don't have any expertise on that.
Sure ! you can do it. Just install AndroPhp it is a localServer for Android.
Locate you project than on your device under the www/ folder. If you have a DB also just import your .sql trough phpmyadmin.
on Android side call you project 127.0.0.1:8080/yourProject
Thats All!