Independent Razor View

#1

Hi, I created the invoicing SaaS iFacture

Currently, PDF documents (invoices and quotes) are generated using code + iTextSharp. This executes very fast but this is not easy to modify.
So, for the new version I want to use ServiceStack + Puppeteer Sharp to generate PDF from a Razor view (.cshtml).
The idea is to have the Razor view inside ServiceInterface project (embedded resource?) (and not on the web project) and pass a populated model during execution to be able to render the HTML View. Since I want to populate the HTML file directly from the model, I don’t need things like relative path or absolute URIs…
After that, Puppeteer Sharp will transform the HTML rendered view in PDF. It’s slower but easier to change.

A project like RazorEngine could do the trick, but it is not maintained anymore and maybe I can do that with ServiceStack Razor.

I am using Framework 6.

How would you do this?

Thank you in advance.

#2

No idea about iTextSharp or Puppeteer which I’ve never used before.

If it’s just the HTML output you want generated it would be much easier to embed #Script since it’s entire environment can be programmatically customized & encapsulated within a Service impl. The service impl of Email Templates is a good example of adding in memory pages / layout in a new ScriptContext and accessing rendered pages content.

Razor by contrast is very fragile and reliant on a number of external moving parts & proper configuration. But here’s a stand-alone example of rendering Razor within a Service impl:

https://docs.servicestack.net/netcore-razor#stand-alone-razor-views

Nice work on the SaaS product, I hope it’s successful! Would make a nice entry in the showcase category on ServiceStack/Discuss.

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#3

Thank you very much. I will try that.
On another part, I’m using ServiceStack on the company I work too (as employeeà. I made an ERP and it is driven by ServiceStack (since 2013). It is not publicly accessible but I am open to share some screenshots and do a use case if you want.

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#4

Yeah definitely the more the merrier, a summary of the App with screenshots would be great.

1 Like