Use the DevExpress PDF Viewer Control to display PDF files directly in your WinForms application, without the need to install an external PDF viewer on your end-user's machine.
This tutorial illustrates how to embed a PDF Viewer in a Windows Forms application, to open, preview, navigate and print PDF documents without the need to install third-party software on the machine.
The tutorial consists of the following sections.
- Create an Application and Add a PDF Viewer
- Create and Customize a PDF Viewer Toolbar
- Load and Preview a PDF File
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Run Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010, 2012 or 2013.
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Start a new project (by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+N), and create a new Windows Forms Application.
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Open the Visual Studio designer and press CTRL+ALT+X to run the Toolbox. Expand the DX.14.1: Common Controls category, and drop the PdfViewer control onto the main form of the application.
To add a toolbar to the PDF Viewer, click the control's smart tag, and in the invoked actions list, select one of the following.
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Create Ribbon
This creates a ribbon illustrated in the following image.
You can fully customize the ribbon afterwards, as well as select a different look and feel for it, via the smart tag of the toolbar.
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Create Bars
Instead of creating a ribbon, you can implement a bar interface. You can upgrade it to the ribbon interface at any time (e.g., when converting the entire application).
To load a document into the PDF Viewer, click the control's smart tag and select Load PDF File... in the actions list that is invoked.
The following code opens a PDF file at runtime.
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The complete sample project is available in the DevExpress Code Examples database at http://www.devexpress.com/example=E4696. Depending on the target platform type (ASP.NET, WinForms, etc), you can either run this example online or download an auto-executable sample. |
The following example illustrates how to load an existing PDF file into the PdfViewer control. To do this, it's necessary to drop thePdfViewer control onto the form, create a Ribbon via the PdfViewer's smart tag and call the PdfViewer.LoadDocument method.
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Run the application and explore the PDF Viewer functionality.