Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC Standalone PDF Viewer Control

24 Jun 20243 minutes to read

The ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer control is used to viewing and printing PDF files in any web application. It provides the best viewing experience available with core interactions such as zooming, scrolling, text searching, text selection, and text copying. Thumbnail, bookmark, hyperlink and table of contents support provides easy navigation within and outside the PDF files.

This section briefly explains about how to integrate ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer control in your ASP.NET MVC application using Visual Studio.

Prerequisites

System requirements for ASP.NET MVC controls

Integrate PDF Viewer into an ASP.NET MVC application

  1. Start Visual Studio and select Create a new project.
  2. Create a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application project.
    Generate-ASP.NET-MVC-project-using-VS2022
  3. Choose the target framework.
    Set-the-project-Name
  4. Select Web Application pattern (MVC) for the project and then select Create button.
    Select-web-application-pattern

ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer NuGet packages installation

To add .NET PDF Viewer control, the following NuGet packages need to be installed in your ASP.NET MVC application.

NOTE

If you creating ASP.NET MVC application with MVC4 package, search for Syncfusion.EJ2.MVC4 and then install it.

Add namespace

Add Syncfusion.EJ2 namespace reference in Web.config under Views folder.

<namespaces>
    <add namespace="Syncfusion.EJ2"/>
</namespaces>

Add style sheet

The theme is referred using CDN inside the <head> of ~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml file as follows,

<head>
    ...
    <!-- Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC controls styles -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.syncfusion.com/ej2/27.1.48/fluent.css" />
</head>

NOTE

Checkout the Themes topic to learn different ways (CDN, NPM package, and CRG) to refer styles in ASP.NET MVC application, and to have the expected appearance for Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC controls.

Add script reference

Add the required scripts using CDN inside the <head> of ~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml file as follows,

<head>
    ...
    <!-- Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC controls scripts -->
    <script src="https://cdn.syncfusion.com/ej2/27.1.48/dist/ej2.min.js"></script>
</head>

NOTE

While referring the scripts from the downloaded resources in your application, make sure to place the ‘ej2-pdfviewer-lib’ assets in the same directory as the ‘ej2.min.js’ script.

Register Syncfusion Script Manager

Open ~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml page and register the script manager in the ASP.NET MVC application as follows.

<body>
...
    <!-- Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC Script Manager -->
    @Html.EJS().ScriptManager()
</body>

NOTE

Add the script manager EJS().ScriptManager() at the end of <body>.

Add ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer control

Add the Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer control in ~/Views/Home/Index.cshtml page. You can load a PDF file in the PDF Viewer by specifying the document name in the DocumentPath property as below.

@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Home Page";
}

<div>
    <div style="height:500px;width:100%;">
        @Html.EJS().PdfViewer("pdfviewer").DocumentPath("https://cdn.syncfusion.com/content/pdf/pdf-succinctly.pdf").Render()
    </div>
</div>

DocumentPath is the property needed to load a PDF file in the PDF Viewer.

Press Ctrl+F5 (Windows) or ⌘+F5 (macOS) to run the app. Then, the Syncfusion ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer control will be rendered in the default web browser.

ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer Control

NOTE

View Sample in GitHub.

NOTE

You can refer to our ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer feature tour page for its groundbreaking feature representations. You can also explore our ASP.NET MVC PDF Viewer example to understand the core features of PDF Viewer.