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Xamarin / Android

Open a document (Android)

You have a few options to open a document such as with an activity, fragment, or view. A diagram of the overall view hierarchy can be found here: View hierarchy.

Display document in fragment on Android

This tutorial only applies to Xamarin.Android.

All actions related to the PDF viewer are handled through the PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2. This fragment extends androidx.fragment.app.Fragment and is responsible for showing documents in tabs.

Host Fragment

Prerequisites

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The trial of Apryse SDK requires a trial key. A commercial license key is required for use in a production environment. Please fill out our licensing form if you do not have a valid license key.
Keep your license keys confidential.
License keys are uniquely generated. Please make sure that it is not publicly available (e.g. in your public GitHub).

Step 1: Update AndroidManifest.xml

  1. In order to support all the features in PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2, we will need to add the Android permissions listed in this table . However if you would like to disable certain features and customize your document viewer, you should leave out unnecessary permissions.
Storage permission
Please note that from Android 6.0 (API 23) and up, applications need to request storage permission at runtime before accessing any files on device.
  1. Enable largeHeap and usesClearTextTraffic:
<application
    ...
    android:largeHeap="true"
    android:usesCleartextTraffic="true">
</application>
If your app is targeting Android SDK version 28 or higher, you will need to add the android:usesCleartextTraffic="true" attribute in your application tag to open HTTP files in the viewer. If you are only working with HTTPS files, this is not required.
  1. Define your Activity to extend AppCompatActivity and use an AppCompat theme:
[Activity(Label = "MyReaderActivity",
    ConfigurationChanges = Android.Content.PM.ConfigChanges.ScreenSize | Android.Content.PM.ConfigChanges.Orientation | Android.Content.PM.ConfigChanges.KeyboardHidden,
    Theme = "@style/PDFTronAppTheme", 
    WindowSoftInputMode = SoftInput.AdjustPan)]
public class MyReaderActivity : AppCompatActivity
{
  ...
}
  1. If you have not done so already, add your license in the AndroidManifest.xml file. The final AndroidManifest.xml file should look something like this:
    <manifest ...>
        <!-- Required permissions are added here -->
        <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>
        <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.RECORD_AUDIO" />
    
        <!-- Add enable largeHeap and usesCleartextTraffic -->
        <application 
            ...
            android:largeHeap="true"
            android:usesCleartextTraffic="true">    
    
            <!-- Add license key in meta-data tag here. This should be inside the application tag. -->
            <meta-data
                android:name="pdftron_license_key"
                android:value="your_license_key_goes_here"/>
    
        </application>
    </manifest>

Step 2: Launch the viewer

Use ViewerBuilder2 to create an instance of PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2, and add it to your activity layout. To add a document viewer fragment for a given password-protected file, call the following method in your activity:

// Add a viewer fragment to the layout container in the specified activity, 
// and returns the added fragment
public PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 addViewerFragment(int fragmentContainer, 
    AppCompatActivity activity, Uri fileUri, String password)
{
    // Create the viewer fragment
    PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 fragment = 
        (PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2) ViewerBuilder2.WithUri(fileUri, password).Build(this);

    // Add the fragment to the layout fragment container
    activity.SupportFragmentManager.BeginTransaction()
        .Replace(fragmentContainer, fragment, null)
        .Commit();

    return fragment;
}

where fragmentContainer is the resource id of a layout in your activity that will contain your fragment:

For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- This FrameLayout will contain our viewer fragment-->
<FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/fragment_container"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"/>

Alternatively if you have extended PdfViewCtrlTabFragment2 or PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2, you can specify your custom classes using the ViewerBuilder2.usingTabClass() method and the ViewerBuilder2.build() method as follows:

// Add a viewer fragment to the layout container in the specified activity, 
// and returns the added fragment
public MyCustomTabHostFragment addViewerFragment(int fragmentContainer, 
    AppCompatActivity activity, Uri fileUri, String password)
{
    // Create the viewer fragment with a custom 
    // PdfViewCtrlTabFragment2 and PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2
    PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 fragment = 
        (PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2) ViewerBuilder2.WithUri(fileUri, password)
                    .UsingTabClass(Java.Lang.Class.FromType(typeof(MyCustomTabFragment)))
                    .Build(activity, Java.Lang.Class.FromType(typeof(MyCustomTabHostFragment)));

    // Add the fragment to the layout fragment container
    activity.SupportFragmentManager.BeginTransaction()
        .Replace(fragmentContainer, fragment, null)
        .Commit();
        
    return fragment;
}
Since Apryse uses the Fragment class from the Support Library, your activity must extend AppCompatActivityand call getSupportFragmentManager() to get the FragmentManager.

Step 3: Customize the viewer

Customize document viewer style

  • If you would like to customize the appearance of the viewer activity, define PDFTronAppTheme in styles.xml:

    <style name="PDFTronAppTheme" parent="PDFTronAppThemeBase">
        <item name="colorPrimary">@color/app_color_primary_day</item>
        <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/app_color_primary_dark_day</item>
        <item name="colorAccent">@color/app_color_accent</item>
        <!-- Action bar -->
        <item name="actionModeBackground">?attr/colorPrimary</item>
        <item name="windowActionModeOverlay">true</item>
    </style>

    You can learn more about this in the customize the viewer's theme guide .

    PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 uses the AppCompat theme for material colors. Make sure that the value of android:theme in your activity tag also extends the AppCompat theme.

Customize using ViewerConfig

  • If you would like to customize certain viewer settings or the UI of PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2, you can use ViewerConfig.Builder. For example:

    public PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 createUsingViewerConfig(Context context, Uri fileUri, String password)
      {
          // Create a ViewerConfig object with custom settings
          var config = new ViewerConfig.Builder()
              .FullscreenModeEnabled(true)
              .MultiTabEnabled(true)
              .DocumentEditingEnabled(true)
              .LongPressQuickMenuEnabled(true)
              .ToolbarTitle("Host Fragment")
              .ShowSearchView(true)
              .Build();
    
          // Pass in the ViewerConfig object into the ViewerBuilder2
          return (PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2) ViewerBuilder2.WithUri(fileUri, password)
              .UsingConfig(config).Build(context);
      }
For details on customizing the UI and using ViewerConfig.Builder, check out the configuration tutorial .

Customize the options toolbar

Default toolbar

The default toolbar menu consists of the following buttons on phones:

  • App navigation
  • Toolbar switcher
  • Tab switcher
  • Overflow menu
Default toolbar

The default toolbar menu consists of the following buttons on tablets:

  • App navigation
  • Toolbar switcher
  • Document text search
  • View mode configuration
  • Thumbnails browser
  • List container
  • Overflow menu

You can fully customize the toolbar menu and the navigation icon by calling the following in ViewerBuilder2, with custom menu resource and drawable resource files:

public PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 createUsingCustomToolbar(Context context, Uri fileUri, int navIcon, int[] menuRes)
{
    return ViewerBuilder2.WithUri(fileUri)
            .UsingCustomToolbar(menuRes)// Specify a custom toolbar
            .UsingNavIcon(navIcon)      // Specify a custom navigation component
            .Build(context);
}

To change the icon color and overflow icon color, in styles.xml:

<style name="ToolbarTheme" parent="ThemeOverlay.AppCompat.Dark.ActionBar">
    <item name="colorControlNormal">@color/red</item>
    <item name="iconTint">@color/red</item>
</style>

To change the navigation icon color, in styles.xml (assume MyTheme is used as the app theme):

<style name="MyTheme" parent="PDFTronAppTheme">
    <item name="toolbarNavigationButtonStyle">@style/ToolbarButtonNavigationStyle</item>
</style>

<style name="ToolbarButtonNavigationStyle" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Toolbar.Button.Navigation">
    <item name="android:tint">@color/red</item>
</style>

Step 4: Interact with the fragment

If you would like to interact with the host fragment you can override the methods that you are interested in through events. For example, you may want to override ToolbarOptionsItemSelected when you add a new menu item, so when the item is clicked you can get a callback. As another example, you can get the callback when the navigation icon is clicked if you override NavButtonPressed.

Here's an example that replaces the default navigation icon and uses a custom toolbar:

var PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2 =
    (PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2) ViewerBuilder2.WithUri(fileUri)
        // Specify a custom toolbar
        .UsingCustomToolbar(new int[] { Resource.Menu.my_custom_toolbar })
        // Specify a custom navigation component
        .UsingNavIcon(Resource.Drawable.ic_arrow_back_white_24dp)      
        .Build(context);

PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2.ToolbarOptionsItemSelected += (sender, e) =>
{
    // Called when toolbar option item is selected
};

PdfViewCtrlTabHostFragment2.NavButtonPressed += (sender, e) =>
{
    // Called when navigation button has been clicked
};

where ic_arrow_back_white_24dp.xml is a drawable resource file for a back arrow icon, and my_custom_toolbar.xml is a menu resource file that contains:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto">
     <item
        android:id="@+id/action_settings"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_settings"
        android:title="@string/action_settings"
        app:showAsAction="ifRoom"/>
    <item
        android:id="@+id/action_show_toast"
        android:title="Show toast"
        app:showAsAction="never" />
</menu>

This sample replaces the navigation icon, removes all toolbar buttons except the annotation toolbar button, and adds a new Show Toast button:

Host Fragment

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