Forms, Open PDF from URL

Question

I'm using Xamarin Forms with Android, I need to open a PDF from an URL in my WebView. For some reason, sometime the the Webview is blank. I've searched a lot on Internet and I found some solution that give me the same result, sometime the PDF in the PDF is showed without problem, sometime is a blank page. I'm using "https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url=" with no results, I'm using this solution ( https://acaliaro.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/open-a-pdf-inside-a-webview-in-xamarin-forms-android/ ) that describe exactly my problem but WebView still show me a blank page sometime.

So, why is so hard to open a PDF Url on Android in a WebView? There is some solution to fix this problem? I don't know what can i else do.

Answer 1

Android WebView not support .pdf file from website, infact, if you try to copy an url with .pdf extension in chrome browser, this will download the file and open in an app. So there is no way to show a PDF in an App in a simple way. But there are two solution:

1. On Google there are a lot solutions that tells you to download the PDF and show in an webview, but in my case I can't download a PDF and show.
2. You can write an .html page in your Server that can "wrap" the PDF sended with an URL in GET mode and show it in an .html page without problem ( using jsPDF is an example ) or by using this prefix ( http://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url= ) but sometime i give a blank page, so i write my own pdf viewer. In this link ( https://acaliaro.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/open-a-pdf-inside-a-webview-in-xamarin-forms-android/ ) you can find another solution, but for some reason, it still doesn't works. Maybe because I'm on Android 5.0 device.