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I'm working on a web application using Laravel 5.8, I'm new to Laravel framework. I would like to display PDF documents on the browser when users click on some buttons. I will allow authenticated users to "View" and "Download" the PDF documents.

I have created a Controller and a Route to allow displaying of the documents. I'm however stuck because I have a lot of documents and I don't know how to use a Laravel VIEW to display and download each document individually.

/* PDFController*/

public function view($id)
{
    $file = storage_path('app/pdfs/') . $id . '.pdf';

    if (file_exists($file)) {

        $headers = [
            'Content-Type' => 'application/pdf'
        ];

        return response()->download($file, 'Test File', $headers, 'inline');
    } else {
        abort(404, 'File not found!');
    }
}

}

/The Route/ Route::get('/preview-pdf/{id}', 'PDFController@view');

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5
  • You want to embed the file to your blade view? Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 17:03
  • Are you wanting to implement this yourself, or would you be open to answers that make use of existing packages? Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 17:05
  • @Mateus - I have the PDF files in the directory storage/app/pdfs. I would like users to view and download these documents. I'm confused on how to use blade and property routing for this to work correctly. Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 17:13
  • Do you have your file paths stored in database or something like that? Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 17:14
  • @Vince - If you know any package that can solve this problem you can share. Thanks. Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 17:14

4 Answers 4

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6

Mateus' answer does a good job describing how to setup your controller function to return the PDF file. I would do something like this in your /routes/web.php file:

Route::get('/show-pdf/{id}', function($id) {
    $file = YourFileModel::find($id);
    return response()->file(storage_path($file->path));
})->name('show-pdf');

The other part of your question is how to embed the PDF in your *.blade.php view template. For this, I recommend using PDFObject. This is a dead simple PDF viewer JavaScript package that makes embedding PDFs easy.

If you are using npm, you can run npm install pdfobject -S to install this package. Otherwise, you can serve it from a CDN, or host the script yourself. After including the script, you set it up like this:

HTML:

<div id="pdf-viewer"></div>

JS:

<script>
PDFObject.embed("{{ route('show-pdf', ['id' => 1]) }}", "#pdf-viewer");
</script>

And that's it — super simple! And, in my opinion, it provides a nicer UX for your users than navigating to a page that shows the PDF all by itself. I hope you find this helpful!

UPDATE: After reading your comments on the other answer, I thought you might find this example particularly useful for what you are trying to do.

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7 Comments

Thanks Vince and Mateus for your help, let me work this, I appreciate your help.
Glad I could help! 👊🏻
@Vince - To use this code means I will have to create a Model and my PDFs will be fetched from the Database?
Not at all -- just an assumption I made.
@Amos, if this answer solved your problem, please upvote it, and mark it as "accepted" (checkmark) so that it can help others in the future. Thanks!
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0

According to laravel docs:

The file method may be used to display a file, such as an image or PDF, directly in the user's browser instead of initiating a download.

All you need to do is pass the file path to the method:

return response()->file($pathToFile);

If you need custom headers:

return response()->file($pathToFile, $headers);
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3 Comments

Thanks, I have this code already, but the challenge is how to use the code in my PDFController and create a Blade View that will display different PDF documents on the browser (without users having to leave the dashboard) These different documents will be displayed when the user clicks on a button. For example if the user clicks a button named "Test PDF", they will be able to view the document on the browser.
You can use $files = Storage::allFiles($directory); to list all files inside some directory. Maybe it helps
@Amos see my answer for a suggestion of how to display your PDFs in your blade view
0 
Route::get('/show-pdf/{id}', function($id) {
    $file = YourFileModel::find($id);
    return response()->file(storage_path($file->path));
})->name('show-pdf');

Or if file is in public folder

Route::get('/show-pdf', function($id='') {
    return response()->file(public_path().'pathtofile.pdf');
})->name('show-pdf');

then show in page using

<embed src="{{ route('show-pdf') }}" type="text/pdf" >
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0

I got the PDF to download from local storage using the following.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;

// the Document controller,...
public function open(Document $document)
    {
        $pathname = storage_path('app/uploads/'.$document->filename); 
        if(File::exists($pathname))
        {
            return response()->file(
                $pathname
            );
        }
        else 
        {
            return redirect()
                ->route('documents.index')
                ->with('failure', 'Failure opening document');
        }
    }
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