I’m working on an ASP.NET web application using C# and need some help with document viewing functionality. I want to show various file types like PDF files, Word documents (both .doc and .docx formats), and Excel spreadsheets directly in the web browser without allowing users to edit them.
My goal is to implement a read-only document viewer that can handle multiple file formats. I’ve heard that Google Docs might be a good solution for this, but I’m not sure how to integrate it properly with my ASP.NET application.
Has anyone successfully implemented something similar? What would be the best approach to display these documents in a browser without download requirements? I’m looking for a solution that works reliably across different browsers and doesn’t require users to have specific plugins installed.
Any code examples or guidance would be really helpful.
Google Docs viewer works great for this. I built something similar two years ago for a document management system. You just construct URLs that point to your docs and Google’s service handles the rest. The catch is your documents need to be publicly accessible - Google has to fetch them somehow. I set up a controller that serves docs with time-limited tokens for anything sensitive. Watch out for complex Office formatting though. Excel files with heavy formatting got mangled sometimes. For important business docs, I added PDF.js as a fallback for PDFs plus some other viewers. There’s a small delay while Google processes everything, but it’s usually fine. The cross-browser support is rock solid, which was huge for our project.
I built this exact thing about six months ago with the Google Docs Viewer API. It’s quite straightforward—just embed an iframe using the URL format: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=YOUR_DOCUMENT_URL&embedded=true. The main challenge is security, as Google requires direct access to your files. I managed this by creating a temporary document handler that generates time-sensitive tokens for access. However, be mindful that files over 25MB won’t load, and since it’s a cloud-based solution, users need an internet connection. If offline support is necessary, consider using PDF.js as a backup for PDFs.
the iframe approach is def your best bet, but be careful with CORS issues. I had issues because my files were hosted on diff domains. also, google viewer can get kinda slow with larger docs, so it might be good to add a loading spinner. but it works well overall.