Simple & Solid Reporting in .NET using ABCpdf.NET

last week I was involved in developing an internal windows application for my company and we wanted to print simple report and keep the application simple to deploy ( xcopy way ) and as we use Windows 7 in all our company computers which already have .NET framework but nothing else ( not crystal reports or MS reporting tools ) , I decided to use ABCpdf.NET to create our simple report via creating html page and converting it to PDF for printing & archiving .

hint : if you don’t have ABCpdf.NET already installed you can download it from this link http://www.websupergoo.com/download.htm ( the 32bit version is about 43MB )

here I am going to explain the first steps to get started with ABCpdf.NET library ..

after downloading and installing ABCpdf.NET library go to Visual Studio and create new windows forms application
add webBrowser control to show the report and a button to save it in PDF file format like this image

add HTML page to your project and put the following HTML in it :

  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> 
  <html> 
  <head> 
      <title></title> 
  </head> 
  <body> 
      <p> 
          Fayedcom Company 
          <br /> 
          Simple Report 
          Test</p> 
      <br /> 
      <br /> 
      <table width="100%"> 
          <tr style="font-weight: bold; background-color: #E0E0E0"> 
              <td> 
                  Client Name 
              </td> 
              <td> 
                  Client Mobile Phone 
              </td> 
              <td> 
                  Client Address 
              </td> 
          </tr> 
          <tr> 
              <td> 
                  [name] 
              </td> 
              <td> 
                  [mobile] 
              </td> 
              <td> 
                  [address] 
              </td> 
          </tr> 
      </table> 
  </body> 
  </html>

change copy to output Directory property of this HTML file to copy if newer or always copy

write the following code to form load event

  string mFileName = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.ExecutablePath) ,"HTMLPage1.htm");
  string mHTML = File.ReadAllText(mFileName); 

  mHTML = mHTML.Replace("[name]","Mohammed Fayed"); 
  mHTML = mHTML.Replace("[mobile]","1234567890"); 
  mHTML = mHTML.Replace("[address]","My Address :)");

  webBrowser1.DocumentText = mHTML;

now run your application , it should be like this
now add reference to ABCpdf.NET library

add this code to button click event

  string mPdfFileName = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.ExecutablePath) ,"tempFile.pdf");

  Doc myPDF = new Doc();
  myPDF.AddImageHtml(webBrowser1.DocumentText);
  myPDF.Save(mPdfFileName);

  System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(mPdfFileName);

this will export your report to PDF and run it the default PDF viewer like this