Invalid characters in data breaks export to pdf

[Ertan]

Hello,
We are using grid in our project and we are faced to an important issue. There are 3 options to export the data displayed on the grid such as Excel, Pdf, and Word. Excel and Word work just fine both there is a problem with exporting to pdf. When we search the log files we came across that there are invalid characters in the data. But these characters are Ok for office to omit them. I saw a similar question in the forum (this), that solution is not acceptable in our standards and will cause performance issues. The other point is that the solution is only focusing on just specific part of the program. In our case we know one parameter but there will be same or different character at the different part of the program. Here is the exception we caught;
Exception information:
Exception type: GridPdfExportException
Exception message: Invalid XHTML. RadGrid has to render correct XHTML in order to export to PDF.
Parse error:
' ', hexadecimal value 0x1A, is an invalid character. Line 883, position 199.

Do you have a solution for this kind of error?
Thanks,
Ertan

[Kostadin]

Hi Ertan,

The most common cause for bad XHTML are symbols like <,>,& that need to be replaced by the correct XHTML entity: & l t ;, & g t ;, & a m p ; respectively.
Note that 0x1a is a restricted character in xml 1.1 and not allowed at all in xml 1.0. It has to be encoded (&#x1a;) to be allowed in a content tag in xml 1.1. You could replace it OnGridExporting event handler.

protected void RadGrid1_GridExporting(object sender, GridExportingArgs e)
    {
        e.ExportOutput = e.ExportOutput.Replace(((char)0x1A).ToString(), "");
    }

Greetings,
Kostadin
the Telerik team

[sln007]

Kostadin,

This works well for an export to EXCEL.  Event does not fire for export to PDF (or at least the export to PDF fails vor a bad XHTML character).

I am actively working on finding solution for this.

[Kostadin]

Hello,

There is an additional event which is fired when exporting to PDF. The event is called OnPdfExporting. More information is available at the following help article.

Regards,
Kostadin
Telerik