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I am building an ASP.NET MVC web app that allows people to upload promotional materials (Word docs, Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, images, etc) to be reviewed by a committee. A user requested the ability to select multiple submissions and print all of the associated materials in one click. Each submission can have multiple file attachments. So, reviewing 10 submissions might result in having to print 25 files.

Thoughts so far:

Convert all files to PDF, aggregate them on the server, and send the result to the browser. User only needs to print one time from Adobe Reader.

My question is - are there any toolsets available to do something like this? I came across the Adobe LiveCycle PDF generator, but due to budget constraints etc, I don't believe it will be a viable solution.

Is there a better way to do something like this?

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2 Answers

I have used in some projects itextSharp, it´s free / open source

You can see some information about it here:




and here:


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Is this a completely internal (to the business) application? Another option is to create a WCF service that handles the printing. Allow the user to queue up the documents, web site sends the names to to the service, and service prints each one individually.

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Yes, completely internal application. How could the service print each one individually? Wouldn't it have to know what printer the user wants to use? –  Mark Sherretta Dec 7 '11 at 16:14
That's a good point. This approach isn't entirely ideal, as you would need to give the users a dropdown in the web app to choose the printer -- which also means that the printers need to be included in the site, probably in the app.config or a database config table. –  sfuqua Dec 7 '11 at 17:30
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