How to show a PDF file in a Django view?

Question

Is it possible to show a PDF file in the Django view, rather than making the user have to download it to see it?

And if it is possible, how would it be done?

This is what I have so far -

@login_required
def resume(request, applicant_id):

    #Get the applicant's resume
    resume = File.objects.get(applicant=applicant_id)
    fsock = open(resume.location, 'r')
    response = HttpResponse(fsock, mimetype='application/pdf')

    return response

Answer 1

it worked for me

import re, os
import os
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
@csrf_exempt
def export_auto_doc(request):
    name = request.GET.get('name', "")
    filename = "path/to/file"+name+".pdf"
    try:
        if not re.search("^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$",name):
            raise ValueError("Filename wrong format")
        elif not os.path.isfile(filename):
            raise ValueError("Filename doesn't exist")
        else:
            with open(filename, 'r') as pdf:
                response = HttpResponse(pdf.read(), content_type='application/pdf')
                response['Content-Disposition'] = 'inline;filename='+name+'.pdf'
                return response
            pdf.closed
    except ValueError as e:
        HttpResponse(e.message)

Answer 2

The easiest way to do this is probably with an anchor in a template. For example, if you are using Django's templating engine (as most people who search for this probably are), simply serve it as a static file through an anchor.

In your template that will contain a link to the file, add at the very top

{% load static %}

Then, wherever you want to link to your pdf, put

<a href="{% static 'relative/path/file.pdf' %}">Click me</a>

The first line tells Django to look in the directories configured for static files in settings.py. The path that you use in the anchor tag is relative to any of the directories that you configured as static directories in settings.py. When you click the rendered link, it should display the PDF in your browser, provided you have your static files pathed correctly.

Answer 3

Django has a class specifically for returning files, FileResponse. It streams files, so that you don't have to read the entire file into memory before returning it. Here you go:

from django.http import FileResponse, Http404

def pdf_view(request):
    try:
        return FileResponse(open('foobar.pdf', 'rb'), content_type='application/pdf')
    except FileNotFoundError:
        raise Http404()

If you have really large files or if you're doing this a lot, a better option would probably be to serve these files outside of Django using normal server configuration.

Answer 4

Simplistically, if you have a PDF file and you want to output it through a Django view, all you need to do is dump the file contents into the response and send it with the appropriate mimetype.

def pdf_view(request):
    with open('/path/to/my/file.pdf', 'r') as pdf:
        response = HttpResponse(pdf.read(), mimetype='application/pdf')
        response['Content-Disposition'] = 'inline;filename=some_file.pdf'
        return response
    pdf.closed

You can probably just return the response directly without specifying Content-Disposition, but that better indicates your intention and also allows you specify the filename just in case the user decides to save it.

Also, note that the view above doesn't handle the scenario where the file cannot be opened or read for whatever reason. Since it's done with with, it won't raise any exceptions, but you still must return some sort of response. You could simply raise an Http404 or something, though.

Answer 5

Take out inline; if you want your file to be read from server. And also, the HttpResponse kwarg mimetype has been replaced by content_type:

(response['Content-Disposition'] = 'inline;filename=some_file.pdf')

def pdf_view(request):
    with open('/app/../Test.pdf', 'r') as pdf:
        response = HttpResponse(pdf.read(),content_type='application/pdf')
        response['Content-Disposition'] = 'filename=some_file.pdf'
        return response
    pdf.closed

Answer 6

Following @radtek's answer above I decided to investigate a class-based view display. I tried to use View but it didn't have get_context_data() method.

I looked here for some guidance. I settled for BaseDetailView since I wanted to display just one object.

from django.http import FileResponse
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
from django.views.generic.detail import BaseDetailView

class DisplayPdfView(BaseDetailView):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        objkey = self.kwargs.get('pk', None) #1
        pdf = get_object_or_404(Pdf, pk=objkey) #2
        fname = pdf.filename() #3
        path = os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'docs\\' + fname)#4
        response = FileResponse(open(path, 'rb'), content_type="application/pdf")
        response["Content-Disposition"] = "filename={}".format(fname)
        return response

Commentary

1 This line accesses a named argument pk passed by the url calling the view.

2 This line gets the actual pdf model object.

3 I defined a method filename(self): return os.path.basename(self.file.name) in my model to help me get just the filename plus extension.

4 This line gets the complete filepath.

Then use file response as explained in the answers above. Also remember to use rb to read the pdf file