Hi Team,

till now we used the "Capture" method of the WebView object to save screenshots of the loaded web page. Our customers are complaining about this meanwhile, because it is an image an they can e.g. not use the text of the page later on.

So we wanted to change to export a PDF document directly. But we are not able to figure out a really good, working way. Here is our use-case:
User navigates to a web site and does some research. They are playing around with some filter etc. At a certain moment she wants to save the current content to her case.

- option 1 (currently used): use capture methode to export content into a image file. pro: content is "as is", so we capture what the user actually sees; pro: it is an image, text could not be used later on
- option 2: use HtmlToPdfSession in combination with GetHtml of the WebView and setting this in RunWebViewCallback export into a pdf. Problem is, that e.g. images are lost and result does not look the same
- option 3: use HtmlToPdfSession in combination with setting URL property of the WebView in RunWebViewCallback and export into a pdf. Problem is, that e.g. images are lost and result does not look the same; also cookies which were accepted before are asked again, because it is kind of new session. Also if user logged in, with this method she is not anymore.
- option 4: use print method to export as a pdf. This is not feasable, because we can not rely that a pdf printer is installed on customers machines. Additionally we would have to select the users the PDF printer to use, if also names would differ from machine to machine.

So currently we do not see a way to have a good quality PDF without any downside. Ideally we would like to see something like the HtmlToPdfSession where we just could provide the currently loaded and already fully rendered WebView which is shown to the user as a parameter. So that the currently visible side is just exported into a PDF.

Did we miss something, a parameter, on overload to simply export into a PDF?

Regards
Andreas

Hi,

thanks for the information. About license: Yes, that was what we expected and we will the extend our license, if that feature will be available in a future release.

Regards
Andreas

Hi,

great to see how fast you act. Unfortunately it does not work for us as we understood it. We created a very simple sample app. It is WPF and we added a browser control and a textbox. We then just opened google.com and did a simple search. Behind a button click we have this code:
private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
var pdfFilePath = System.IO.Path.ChangeExtension(System.IO.Path.GetTempFileName(), ".pdf");
HtmlToPdf.Capture(CtrWebView).PdfDocument.Save(pdfFilePath);
Process.Start(pdfFilePath);
}
CtrWebView is defined in this way:
<eo:WebView x:Name="CtrWebView" />

But the resulting PDF does not contain the content, which is currently visible to the user. In the view there are a couple of search results, the PDF shows only a text with something like "click here if you are not forwarded automatically".

Regards
Andreas

Hi,

that's interesting. Google is not our primary site our users will use. We have some other sides, it was just what we used for a first test. We will try our own sites, which are important for our customers. We will come back with some news on that soon.

Regards
Andreas

Hi,

This is just to let you know that we have posted a new build (23.3.84) that should allow you to capture Google's output. You can download the new build from our download page.

Thanks!

HI,

Our up coming 2024 release should resolve this issue. We are expecting it to be out in a week or two. We will reply here again once it is out.

Thanks!