HTML to PDF using a WCF Service

TL; DR - "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Some time ago I wrote a post which demonstrated how you could make PDFs from HTML using C# and wkhtmltopdf. To my lasting surprise this has been the most popular post I've written. I recently put together an ASP.NET WCF service which exposed this functionality which I thought might be worth sharing. The code can be found on GitHub here.

A little more detail

I should say up front that I'm still a little ambivalent about how sensible an idea this is. Behind the scenes this WCF service is remotely firing up wkhtmltopdf using System.Diagnostics.Process. I feel a little wary about recommending this as a solution for a variety of not particularly defined reasons. However, I have to say I've found this pretty stable and reliable. Bottom line it seems to work and work consistently. But I though I should include a caveat emptor; there is probably a better approach than this available. Anyway...

There isn't actually a great deal to say about this WCF service. It should (hopefully) just do what it says on the tin. Putting it together didn't involve a great deal of work; essentially it takes the code from the initial blog post and just wraps it in a WCF service called PdfMaker. The service exposes 2 methods:

1. GetPdf - given a supplied URL this method creates a PDF and then returns it as a Stream to the client
2. GetPdfUrl - given a supplied URL this method creates a PDF and then returns the location of it to the client

Both of these methods also set a Location header in the response indicating the location of the created PDF.

That which binds us

The service uses webHttpBinding. This is commonly employed when people want to expose a RESTful WCF service. The reason I've used this binding is I wanted a simple "in" when calling the service. I wanted to be able to call the service via AJAX as well as directly by browsing to the service and supplying a URL-encoded URL like this:

http://localhost:59002/PdfMaker.svc/GetPdf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com/

You may wonder why I'm using http://news.ycombinator.com for the example above. I chose this as Hacker News is a very simple site; very few resources and a small page size. This means the service has less work to do when creating the PDF; it's a quick demo.

I should say that this service is arguably *not* completely RESTful as each GET operation behind the scenes attempts to create a new PDF (arguably a side-effect). These should probably be POST operations as they create a new resource each time they're hit. However, if they were I wouldn't be able to just enter a URL into a browser for testing and that's really useful. So tough, I shake my fist at the devotees of pure REST on this occasion. (If I should be attacked in the street shortly after this blog is posted then the police should be advised this is good line of inquiry...)

Good behaviour

It's worth noting that automaticFormatSelectionEnabled set to true on the behaviour so that content negotiation is enabled. Obviously for the GetPdf action this is rather meaningless as it's a stream that's passed back. However, for the GetPdfUrl action the returned string can either be JSON or XML. The Fiddler screenshots below demonstrate this in action:

JSON

XML

Test Harness

As a final touch I added in a test harness in the form of Demo.aspx. If you browse to it you'll see a screen a little like this:

It's fairly self-explanatory as you can see. And here's an example of the output generated when pointing at Hacker News:

And that's it. If there was a need this service could be easily extended to leverage the various options that wkhtmltopdf makes available. Hope people find it useful.