Note: This original post is considered outdated. It is no longer necessary to write additional code to convert a page that requires login. See our follow up post for more details.

The original method described below is still valid and is kept for your reference.

Very often you must login through a login page first before you can access a page. For example, for an online shopping website, in order to access OrderHistory.aspx, the user must login to establish his/her identify first. In this case, if the user accesses OrderHistory.aspx directly without login, they will usually be presented the login page.

The situation will be exactly the same for EO.Pdf HTML to PDF converter. If you pass OrderHistory.aspx directly to the converter, the converter will not be able to access that page because it can not establish its identity with the web server. The web server will serve the login page instead. In that case the converted result will be the login page instead of the order history page.

In order to avoid such situation, you must provide enough information to the converter so that the converter can establish an identity with the server. If you have control over the server side code, you can:

1. Modify web.config to allow anonymous access to such pages. For example, add a location element to your web.config to allow anonymous access to OrderHistory.aspx;

2. Since the page now allows anonymous access, you must now check the user's identity in your page. If user has already logged in, then you can proceed to the normal logic; Otherwise proceed to step 3;

3. You can code your page to check additional query string arguments to establish user identity. For example, allowing user to pass such information to your page:

OrderHistory.aspx?user_id=1234&password=5678

In your code you can then check the passed in user_id and password and use that information to establish user identity.

Note: Do not pass user name and password in clear text in your real application. The above link is for demonstration only. Encrypt the information you pass in through query string in your real application.

If you do not have control over the server side code, you can capture the authentication cookie information and then pass the cookie to the server through HtmlToPdf.Options.AdditionalHeaders. The server will decode the authentication cookie and establish user identify with the cookie information.

"If you do not have control over the server side code, you can capture the authentication cookie information and then pass the cookie to the server through HtmlToPdf.Options.AdditionalHeaders. The server will decode the authentication cookie and establish user identify with the cookie information. "

This would be ideal for our use. I have the Authentication Cookie (encrypted) and the Authentication Ticket (decrypted), so how do I add this information to HtmlToPdf.Options.AdditionalHeaders?

This code should be close, but I don't know what goes in the questionmarks:
Dim authcookie As HttpCookie = HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies.Get(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName)
Dim authticket As FormsAuthenticationTicket = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(authcookie.Value)
HtmlToPdf.Options.AdditionalHeaders = New String() {String.Format("Cookie: $Version=1; {0}={1}", ???, ???)}

My page uses a MasterPage with UpdatePanel. ASPXtoPDF does not work well there but HTMLtoPDF does. The only problem is forms authentication, which is a requirement of my project. The calling page is in the same application as the page to be printed.

Your documentation says that "you can capture the authentication cookie information and then pass the cookie to the server through HtmlToPdf.Options.AdditionalHeaders" and I am just asking for an example showing this.

Second question: does ASPXtoPDF work with MVC3? Another project I am working on will need authenticated forms converted to PDF. If HTMLtoPDF.ConvertURL is not recommended for forms requiring authentication, is ASPXtoPDF the appropriate solution for a secure MVC3 application?

Thanks,
Rocco

Okay. Passing the authentication cookie would be best for my situation, and your marketing documentation makes it sound like a reasonable option, but I will take your advice and abandon that approach.

I have reworked the "Printer Friendly" ASPX form and added the ASPXtoPDF control to it. My specs require that from a different page, the user will click a button ("Display PDF") that needs to pop-up this form as a PDF. (yes, ConvertURL would have been perfect) They do not go to the page and then click a button. So, my "Display PDF" button pops up a window for my "Printer Friendly" form with RenderAsPDF() at the end of its Form_Load procedure. This workaround is very close to what I'm looking for. The only hurdle is the "Open Save Cancel" dialog box. I need it to just open. The user already clicked my button to display the PDF making the dialog redundant and confusing. Note: they can "save as" from the Adobe Reader tools, so they really don't need that dialog box.

My question: Is there a property I can set to just display the newly rendered page without forcing the user to answer a dialog box.

The popup dialog box was being delivered by the browser when displaying ASPXtoPDF rendered page. I was able to avoid this by saving the PDF to the server in AfterRender event and then redirecting to the PDF file.

It may help others who get similar requirements, so here is my code: