I’m working on a web application built with ASP.NET and C# backend code. I want to integrate Google Docs functionality to show various document types directly in the browser.
My main goal is to display different file formats like PDF files, Word documents (both .doc and .docx), and Excel spreadsheets in a read-only mode for users. They should be able to view these documents without being able to edit them.
What’s the best approach to implement this feature? Are there any specific APIs or libraries I should use? I’m looking for a solution that works well with my current ASP.NET framework.
Any help or guidance would be appreciated!
I’ve been working with document viewers in ASP.NET for years and got mixed results with different approaches. Google Docs Viewer was my go-to at first, but the public URL requirement killed it for most enterprise projects. What worked best was a hybrid solution - Microsoft’s Office Online Server for Office docs and Mozilla’s PDF.js for PDFs. You can host PDF.js locally, which gives you complete control over the viewing experience. For Word and Excel files, consider converting them server-side using libraries like DocumentFormat.OpenXml or simple HTML conversion depending on what you need. The key is storing documents securely on your server and serving them through controlled endpoints rather than exposing direct file URLs.
I ran into the same issue with document viewing in ASP.NET. First tried Google Docs Viewer with an iframe (https://docs.google.com/viewer?url= + document URL). Problem was documents needed to be publicly accessible - managing private files was a pain. Google still supports this but it’s deprecated now. Ended up switching to PDF.js for PDFs and Office Web Apps for Word/Excel files. Using server-side libraries like Aspose to convert everything to PDF or HTML gave me way more control and stability.
the Google docs viewer is kinda outdated. I recommend checking out GroupDocs.Viewer – it integrates nicely with asp.net and supports all the file types you need. no need for public files like google’s old method. they have a free version that could fit your needs.