It also uses the OfficeController class which is responsible for the lifecycle of OpenOffice’s process – it starts, monitors, and finally kills soffice.exe when not used, to preserve resources. It employs various classes from the namespace to communicate with OpenOffice, and mimics operations such as opening a file, exporting it as PDF, etc. Here is a diagram presenting the classes used in the process:ĬonversionToPDF is the main class when it comes to performing useful work. The result was a Windows Service which wraps the OpenOffice process, taking care of the security context and the usage, while providing the needed functionality over Remoting (am I a service-oriented freak or what? :)).
#.NET PDF CREATOR HOW TO#
As someone who has a pretty nasty experience with () (using interactive applications such as Word by programmatically mimicking user actions), I started thinking on how to isolate OpenOffice and query it independently of the main application process, thus enabling loose coupling and a more stable environment. I was saddened to find out that the headless mode of OpenOffice just minimizes GUI operations, not totally avoiding them. Follow it, and you'll easily create WordML files (like the one used here) from a database or XML. If you are looking for a way to do that, I'm encouraging you to first take a look at my Generating Word Reports / Documents article. Just to note, in this article, I'll talk about creating PDF from other documents, not from scratch. More than anything else, my interest was to load any supported format into OpenOffice and then export it as PDF.
#.NET PDF CREATOR INSTALL#
Still, it promises much – you install OpenOffice, start it in Service mode, send commands over the API, and get to use any feature it provides. It seems that it has been around for quite some time, but as it is mainly targeted at Java developers, it is no wonder that there were no big fuss about it in C# groups. Ideaĭuring a talk with my friend Toni Ruža (who is primarily a Python developer) about a way to easily convert some WordML reports to PDF, he pointed me to the headless OpenOffice mode. But, for those who don’t want or simply can’t shell out over $1000 for a chance to convert other formats to PDF – I hope that this solution will prove as an attractive alternative. NET 1.1 times – it is a pain to create PDFs.įor those of you who have access to components which can convert popular formats to PDF, this article is pretty much useless. Unfortunately, the situation with it and C# haven’t changed much in couple past years - if there were no new, fancy, priced components, I would conclude that it’s almost the same as it was in. Still, it somehow manages to wiggle in almost every project I'm on – clients want to send out documents, Word is bounded to Windows, HTML is lame, PDF it is. I must confess that I’m not a big fan of PDF.
#.NET PDF CREATOR CODE#
At the end of the article there is link to the instructions that will make code work with OpenOffice 3. OpenOffice 2.4.1 was used during writing of article.
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