Jesse Liberty

It is fairly easy to display a PDF file that is local to your phone.  For example, see this article from Xamarin.com.

A bit trickier is to get a PDF from a server and then to display it.  Here’s how I did it (note, this blog post offers snippets of code, rather than a complete solution… I will reduce my larger program to something manageable asap)

The first thing I did was create a model object named ReportItem. Its primary goal is to help group all the items in my list of pdf’s, but it contains the all-important URL to the pdf itself.

Next, I created a page named ShowPDFPage.  In the XAML part of this page I just have a CustomWebView:

         <local:CustomWebView Uri="foo.pdf" 
                               HorizontalOptions="FillAndExpand"
                               VerticalOptions="FillAndExpand" />

The CustomWebView was taken from an article I found on the web.

 public class CustomWebView : WebView
    {
       public static readonly BindableProperty UriProperty = BindableProperty.Create (propertyName:"Uri",
             returnType:typeof(string),
             declaringType:typeof(CustomWebView),
             defaultValue:default(string));
 
       public string Uri
       {
          get { return ( string ) GetValue( UriProperty ); }
          set { SetValue( UriProperty, value ); }
       }
    }

This performs the magic of showing the PDF file, but how do we get it?

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