How often do users of your web application need to view documents? Invoices, reports, contracts, manuals, resumes, spreadsheets, presentations – the list goes on. The traditional approach? Providing a download link.

But let’s be honest, the “download link” workflow is often clunky:

  • User Friction: Click to download, find the file, wait for another application (like Adobe Reader or MS Word) to open… it pulls the user out of your application’s experience.
  • Software Dependency: What if the user doesn’t have the right software installed? Or they’re on a mobile device with limited capabilities? You risk them not being able to view the document at all.
  • Loss of Context: Once downloaded, the document lives outside your application, making integrated workflows (like commenting or status tracking) harder.
  • Version Control Issues: Users might save local copies that quickly become outdated.

There’s a much smoother, more professional way: embedding a document viewer directly into your .NET web application. And that’s exactly what Doconut empowers you to do.

Introducing Seamless In-App Viewing with Doconut

Doconut is a powerful .NET component designed specifically for web applications. It allows you to render and display a wide variety of document formats right within your website or web app’s interface.

Think of it as a universal viewing window you can easily integrate. Instead of forcing a download, users can view PDFs, Word documents (DOC, DOCX), Excel spreadsheets (XLS, XLSX), PowerPoint presentations (PPT, PPTX), images (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF), and many other formats seamlessly, without ever leaving your site.

Why Embed a Viewer like Doconut?

Integrating Doconut into your .NET project brings significant advantages:

  1. Superior User Experience: Keep users engaged within your application. Viewing documents becomes instant and effortless, just another part of the workflow.
  2. Universal Compatibility: Doconut handles the rendering complexity. As long as Doconut supports the format, your users can view it, regardless of the software installed on their local machine or device.
  3. No Client-Side Dependencies: Users don’t need Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office, or specific browser plugins. The viewing experience is consistent across browsers and platforms.
  4. Enhanced Control: Keep sensitive documents within the controlled environment of your application. You can potentially manage permissions and track viewing activity more effectively.
  5. Streamlined Workflows: Facilitates processes like document review, approval cycles, or simply referencing information without context switching.
  6. Easy Integration for .NET Developers: Doconut is built for the .NET ecosystem, offering straightforward integration with ASP.NET (Web Forms, MVC), ASP.NET Core, and potentially Blazor applications.

How Doconut Works

While the specific implementation details are in the documentation, the general idea is simple:

  1. Install: Add the Doconut NuGet package to your .NET web project.
  2. Configure: Set up any necessary configurations (like license keys or storage paths, if applicable).
  3. Embed: Use the provided Doconut control or tag helpers within your Razor pages, Views, Blazor components, or ASPX pages.
  4. Point to Document: Pass the path or stream of the document you want to display to the Doconut component.

Doconut typically handles the server-side processing needed to render the document faithfully into a web-viewable format, which is then displayed in the embedded viewer on the client-side.