Reporting Services as PDF through WebRequest in C# 3.5 "Not Supported File Type"
- by Heath Allison
I've inherited a legacy application that is supposed to grab an on the fly pdf from a reporting services server. Everything works fine up until the point where you try to open the pdf being returned and adobe acrobat tells you:
Adobe Reader could not open
'thisStoopidReport'.pdf' because it is
either not a supported file type or
because the file has been damaged(for
example, it was sent as an email
attachment and wasn't correctly
decoded).
I've done some initial troubleshooting on this. If I replace the url in the WebRequest.Create() call with a valid pdf file on my local machine ie: @"C:temp/validpdf.pdf") then I get a valid PDF.
The report itself seems to work fine. If I manually type the URL to the reporting services report that should generate the pdf file I am prompted for user authentication. But after supplying it I get a valid pdf file.
I've replace the actual url,username,userpass and domain strings in the code below with bogus values for obvious reasons.
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(@"http://x.x.x.x/reportServer?/reports/reportNam&rs:format=pdf&rs:command=render&rc:parameters=blahblahblah");
int totalSize = 0;
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("validUser", "validPass", "validDomain");
request.Timeout = 360000; // 6 minutes in milliseconds.
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Post;
request.ContentLength = 0;
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
Response.Clear();
BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(response.GetResponseStream());
Byte[] buffer = new byte[2048];
int count = reader.Read(buffer, 0, 2048);
while (count > 0)
{
totalSize += count;
Response.OutputStream.Write(buffer, 0, count);
count = reader.Read(buffer, 0, 2048);
}
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Private);
Response.CacheControl = "private";
Response.Expires = 30;
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=thisStoopidReport.pdf");
Response.AddHeader("Content-Length", totalSize.ToString());
reader.Close();
Response.Flush();
Response.End();
