Border around PDF Link

[Mark]

Hi!  Our company is looking into purchasing the latest version of Reporting, so we grabbed the free trial version to try it out and see if it will work for us.  My boss gave me until this Wednesday to present a PDF export that suits our needs.

Everything's working great so far, except I can't figure out how to remove borders around an element that has been assigned an Action to Navigate to Url.  How can I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance!

[Steve]

Hello Mark,

We're not sure what border you refer to as we do not render borders around hyperlinks in PDF format (see attached screenshot). Can you elaborate or provide us with a sample that shows this border?

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Mark]

I'm sorry, I should have been more clear!  The elements that I'm giving Navigate to Url Actions to are TextBoxes.  As part of their original formatting, they have no borders.  However, when I give them the Actions, the border appears around the TextBox, and I don't know how to get rid of it.

I'm actually not at work right now, but I will be in a few hours.  I can't provide screenshots until then, if that's still necessary.

Mark

[Steve]

Hello Mark,

The item in the screenshot from the ReportCatalog report is also a TextBox. Please provide a screenshot or a sample that exhibits the undesired formatting.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Mark]

I must apologize once again!  I forgot to mention that the text boxes are located within a Table and the text is dynamically generated, but hopefully some screenshots will clear things up a bit more.  On the screenshot "designer.png", it shows that the action of the TextBox is set to Navigate to Url with the Target Url set to the text that shows up in the text box.  Basically, if the text is a valid web Url, it gets turned into a clickable link, and it works perfectly as you can see in the screenshot "undesiredborder.png."  (I have also included conditional formatting to underline and turn it blue).  But as you can see, the text box now has a border.

edit:  "Sample Link" and "http://www.google.com" are two separate dynamically generated strings that show up in different TextBoxes and Rows in the Table.

[Mark]

Hi...just making sure you didn't forget about me...  My boss actually gave me more time to work on this, so any help will still be appreciated!

[Steve]

Hi Mark,

Whether the URL comes from a database field or is hard-coded is irrelevant, we do not apply any different styles. I've attached a sample table item that has an url action for the TextBox item in the Ro1Col1. As you can see the exported PDF does not contain any border around it. Feel free to modify the sample to show the problem, if you can only replicate it with dynamic data, you can create dummy DataTable and bind the Table via the ObjectDataSource component.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Mark]

Thank you so much for those samples, Steve.  They really helped to solve my problem.  I opened up the .pdf that was included in the .zip file, and found that there was indeed still a border around the TextBox Ro1Col1.  Considering this, I thought that it might be my PDF viewer (Foxit Reader) that may just be rendering boxes around links.  So using Adobe Reader,  I opened up your sample .pdf and the previous .pdfs that I've made and found that there were no borders to be seen!  I'm sure there's a way to change this in Foxit Reader, but everything on Telerik Reporting's end seems to be fine.  Keep up the good work!

And thanks again.

[Travis]

I'm also seeing a border around a textbox that has an action (link to url) when exported to pdf.  I've tested this in Adobe Reader X and XI and both display the same behavior.  When I open your sample zip file it also has a black border around the first cell.

I am using an older version of the Report control - Reporting Q1 2011, however, I tested with Q3 2012 and got the same result.

[Steve]

Hi Travis,

Thank you for sharing your Acrobat version, once I've upgraded to Acrobat Reader version 10.1.4 I am able to reproduce the borders around hyperlinks in PDF. As we have not changed anything in our PDF rendering extension and this occurs only with that specific Acrobat version (we do not see any borders with any previous Acrobat version), we suspect it is introduced by Adobe. I've found the following links that confirm this:

• Adobe forums
• Text borders on HyperLinks appear in Adobe Reader version 10.1.4

We did not find any change in the PDF specification that would justify this change, and the reply from Adobe representative sounds like they are not aware of this, so we would be keeping an eye to see the outcome. Good news is that those borders are only visible in the PDF viewer, they are not present when the PDF is printed.

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Travis]

Ah, I didn't try to print.  I guess that is somewhat good news. 

[Jon Markee]

Is there any update to this thread.

Telerik are you working on a solution?

Thanks!

[Steve]

Hi Jon,

The problem is not in our PDF rendering and occurs with any PDF document that contains hyperlinks. As Adobe have not provided any feedback whether it is possible to disable the border and how, there is not much we can do.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Jon Markee]

It appears that other products have fixed this issue.

http://www.aspose.com/community/files/51/.net-components/aspose.pdf-for-.net/entry432898.aspx

Would be good to get an ETA from Telerik.

[Steve]

Hello Jon,

Thanks for the involvement, after digging a bit more, we found what causes the black borders. There was a bug in Acrobat Reader that did not show the border, so that is why everything showed fine in older versions. We would fix it for subsequent release of the product but cannot engage with a specific time frame.

Thanks you for the patience and understanding.

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team