Export Grid to PDF on the Server

This set of sample projects showcases how you can build a custom PDF export on the server for the current grid data.

Key Points

• A shared project (PdfExport) is responsible for generating the PDF file through the Telerik Document Processing libraries based on provided data and grid state.

  • The RadSpreadProcessing approach may perform better with large data sets, you can use this project to test which is more suitable for your case.

• You can choose which Blazor project to run by marking it as a Startup project (The ServerSideSample or the ServerPdfExport.Server for the WASM flavor).

• The current grid filters and paging are obtained through the OnRead event and sent to the server for processing and generation. You can read more about this general performance optimization technique in the Use Telerik DataSourceRequest and DataSourceResult on the server sample project.

Built-in Feature

This project returns the file as a byte array for both the server and WebAssembly flavors to both unify the code for reuse, and to provide a performance improvement for the WebAssembly scenario.

Such operations are slow in the browser at this point mostly due to the lack of multithreading and AoT for Blazor, and Full AoT for Mono, and because exporting all the data would be a serious performance hit for serialization, especially with large data sets.

At the time of writing, the WebAssembly performance issues are the main showstopper for a built-in feature in the Telerik Grid for this - the speed in a WebAssembly scenario is not satisfactory for real-world sizes of data. You can Follow when the PDF export becomes a built-in feature here.

Next Steps

In this example, reflection and generic methods are used to get the data in the PDF. In your case you could change this to match your needs. Some ideas you can consider are:

• Provide a list of the fields you want to export on your own. Getting them with reflection does not guarantee a certain order.

• Using a strongly typed service can avoid the usage of reflection and thus improve performance.

• Consider sending the state of the grid columns to the service to use only designated fields and a particular column order/size (see how to get that in the Get Current Columns Visibility, Order, Field section of the docs).

• If you will be exporting only small files, you can consider moving the PDF generation within your WebAssembly project, but it may be considerably slower than fetching the file from an API endpoint on the server.