The 3rd and 4th arguments of the ImportFromUrl method are a username and password that can be used if the URL being opened is protected via Basic Authentication, as follows:

Doc.ImportFromUrl "http://www.server.com/script.asp", "landscape=true", "jsmith", "pwd"

13.2.2 .NET Forms Authentication

Under .NET, the Username and Password arguments can instead be used to pass an authentication cookie in case both the script calling ImportFromUrl and a file being converted to PDF are protected by the same user account under .NET Forms authentication. To pass a cookie to ImportFromUrl, the cookie name prepended with the prefix "Cookie:" is passed via the Username argument, and the cookie value via the Password argument. The following example illustrates this technique.

Suppose you need to implement a "Click here for a PDF version of this page" feature in a .NET-based web application. The application is protected with .NET Forms Authentication:

<authentication mode="Forms">
  <forms name="MyAuthForm" loginUrl="login.aspx" protection="All">
    <credentials passwordFormat = "SHA1">
      <user name="JSmith" password="13A23E365BFDBA30F788956BC2B8083ADB746CA3"/>
       ... other users
    </credentials>
  </forms>
</authentication>

The page that needs to be converted to PDF, say report.aspx, contains the button "Download PDF version of this report" that invokes another script, say convert.aspx, which calls AspPDF's ImportFromUrl. Both scripts reside in the same directory under the same protection.

If convert.aspx simply calls objDoc.ImportFromUrl( "http://localhost/dir/report.aspx", ... ), the page that ends up being converted will be login.aspx and not report.aspx, because AspPDF itself has not been authenticated against the user database and naturally will be forwarded to the login screen.

To solve this problem, we just need to pass the authentication cookie whose name is MyAuthForm (the same as the form name) to ImportFromUrl. The following code (placed in convert.aspx) does the job:

C#

<%@ Import Namespace="System.Web" %> <%@ Import Namespace="System.Reflection" %> <%@ Import Namespace="ASPPDFLib" %> <script runat=server language="C#"> private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {   IPdfManager objPDF;   objPDF = new PdfManager();   String strCookieName = "", strCookieValue = "";   ' Search for our authentication cookie   for( int i = 0; i < Request.Cookies.Count; i++ )   {     if( Request.Cookies[i].Name == "MyAuthForm" )     {       strCookieName = Request.Cookies[i].Name;       strCookieValue = Request.Cookies[i].Value;       break;     }   }   IPdfDocument objDoc = objPDF.CreateDocument(Missing.Value);   objDoc.ImportFromUrl( "http://localhost/dir/report.aspx", Missing.Value,     "Cookie:" + strCookieName, strCookieValue );   objDoc.SaveHttp( "attachment;filename=report.pdf" ); } </script>

Note that the cookie name is prepended with the prefix "Cookie:" before being passed to ImportFromUrl.

To simplify debugging, ImportFromUrl can be used in a debug mode. If the parameter Debug=true is used, ImportFromUrl returns a log of non-fatal errors encountered during the conversion process. A log entry consists of the entry type, such as "Image", "CSS", etc., error message, and relevant data, such as the invalid URL, unknown font name, etc. Log entries are separated by two pairs of CR/LF characters.

The following code snippet invokes ImportFromUrl in the debug mode and displays the error log:

Log = Doc.ImportFromUrl( "http://www.server.com/script.asp", "debug=true" )
Response.Write Log

A typical log string may look as follows:

Image: Error opening URL. HTTP Status Code: 404
Data: http://www.persits.com/image.gif

Font: Font name cannot be found.
Data: Arrial