Receipt PDFs in ASP.NET Core

Why receipts become PDFs

A receipt is proof a payment happened, and customers attach it to expense claims. It has to survive being forwarded, printed and filed by someone who never had an account with you. That is the difference between a document and a view of a database, and it is why ecommerce and point-of-sale teams keep asking for this.

What a receipt has to carry

Before any of the code below matters, the template has to produce a document that is actually a receipt. These are the fields that make it one, and the ones a reader or an auditor will look for first.

• the payment reference from the processor, which is what a dispute is traced by
• the amount actually captured, which is not always the amount ordered
• the payment method, usually the card brand and last four digits
• the timestamp with a timezone, since expense systems reconcile by date
• the merchant legal name, which may differ from the brand on the site

Turning your Razor template into a document

You already have the markup. Await _razorRenderer.RenderViewToStringAsync("Invoice", model) gives you it as a string, which is the only input the render needs. Rendering a Razor view to a string outside the MVC pipeline needs an explicit ActionContext, which is why most projects end up with a small RazorViewToStringRenderer service. Write it once and inject it.

The ASP.NET Core implementation

IHttpClientFactory ships with the runtime, so this adds no dependency. The render happens in an action returning FileStreamResult, and you return File(stream, "application/pdf").

// Controllers/ReceiptController.cs
using System.Net.Http.Json;

[ApiController]
public class ReceiptController : ControllerBase
{
    private readonly IHttpClientFactory _factory;
    private readonly RazorViewToStringRenderer _razor;

    public ReceiptController(IHttpClientFactory factory, RazorViewToStringRenderer razor)
        => (_factory, _razor) = (factory, razor);

    [HttpGet("/receipts/{id}.pdf")]
    public async Task<IActionResult> Pdf(string id, CancellationToken ct)
    {
        var receipt = await _receipts.FindAsync(id, ct);
        var html = await _razor.RenderViewToStringAsync("ReceiptPdf", receipt);

        // From the factory. new HttpClient() per request exhausts sockets under
        // load, and the symptom only appears in production.
        var client = _factory.CreateClient("pdfpipe");

        var upstream = await client.PostAsJsonAsync("https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf", new
        {
            html,
            options = new { format = "A4", printBackground = true },
        }, ct);

        upstream.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();

        var stream = await upstream.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync(ct);
        return File(stream, "application/pdf", $"receipt-{id}.pdf");
    }
}

The CSS that makes a receipt page correctly

The layout problem specific to this document is that receipts are short and usually want a narrow page, so the default A4 canvas leaves an expanse of white unless the page size is set deliberately. These rules handle it.

/* A receipt on A4 is mostly white space. Set the page to the
   content, and let it grow only as far as the items require. */
@page {
  size: 80mm 200mm;
  margin: 6mm;
}

body { font-size: 11px; }

What goes wrong in ASP.NET Core

new HttpClient() per request exhausts sockets under sustained load, because each disposed handler leaves a connection in TIME_WAIT. Inject IHttpClientFactory. This is the most common .NET HTTP mistake that only appears in production.

What people try first

Most ASP.NET Core projects reach for PuppeteerSharp, which downloads and supervises a Chromium build from inside your own process, or QuestPDF, which is a fluent layout API rather than a way to render HTML you already have. That works until it is running on more than one machine, at which point the browser becomes the thing you operate rather than the thing you use.

Where the receipt lives afterwards

Rendering is the short part. The customer keeps it, not you, and they submit it to an expense system months later. It has to be readable by software that never saw your site, which is why the amount and reference belong in selectable text rather than inside an image.

Getting the document right

• Check the amount paid and the payment reference, which is what an expense system matches against.
• Generation is triggered by a successful payment webhook, so size the timeout for that path rather than for a health check.
• Volume arrives in bursts, so queue the render rather than doing it inside the request that triggered it.
• Backgrounds are painted by default here, so a design that uses colour needs nothing set. Only an explicit print_background of false turns them off.

Frequently asked

Related

Other ASP.NET Core documents, and the same receipt in other stacks.