asp.net complex html to pdf

We have a website project which is left unfinished by it’s irresponsible coder. (we had some bad experience and we are searching for someone new and better). We have very very limited time and need both good and fast programmer with experience and knowledge. This website is made from 2 sections. Public part(flash website) and a not public product catalog part(under catalog folder) You will only work in the catalog/ part. No work is required in the flash website. A membership is required for browsing online product catalog which also includes a file download function and a product search. (Basically we are opening our product database to our good customers) Website has the feature for creating large pdf catalogs from dynamic html. This is a complex function which has performance issues. Wee need you to fix this major issue of performance and also do some minor work on the pdf generation code. ## Deliverables We have a website project which is left unfinished by it’s irresponsible coder. (we had some bad experience and we are searching for someone new and better). We have very very limited time and need both good and fast programmer with experience and knowledge. Here is general info of the website: This website is made from 2 sections. Public part(flash website) and a not public product catalog part(under catalog folder) You will only work in the catalog/ part. No work is required in the flash website. A membership is required for browsing online product catalog which also includes a file download function and a product search. (Basically we are opening our product database to our good customers) Membership area is accessed from catalog/[login to view URL] Server used: 2 Xeon cpu. 1gb memory. IIS 6. Asp.Net 3.5. 20gb free disk. THE JOB: We have most of the code ready. You don’t have to deal with the details of the pdf generation. But the code we have is not capable of generating a successful final pdf. General info: We have dynamic asp.net pages (under catalog\pdf) which they have their content form db(so page counts, sizes and content is changeable). These pages are used to retrieve the content and most of the style of the pdf. Also some pages of the pdf are generated from a single image file. Not all content and style comes from the asp.net pages. Some small parts of the pdf are inserted by directly acccesing to db and positioning the related pulled data on the pdf. Also there are some parts of pdf which uses the pdfs itself as source of data. For example the “content index?? of pdf, gets the page numbers of the content sections from inside the pdf. The final pdf will probably be 200-300mb. So it’s a heavy job. Pdf is generated by the heavy help of winnovative html to pdf library. [login to view URL] I text sharp library is also used. Previous coder was also thinking about using winnovatives PDF Merge library as well.(we don’t have license for this) Pdf generation page is catalog\pdf\[login to view URL] (all code is in this page) The logic is to generate all different parts of the pdf separately and then merge them together while doing some necessary arrangements (like inserting page numbers) Probably we are able to generate the parts but we receive errors while merging them together. Our problems are mainly performance/hardware/IIS related. You must study the current code carefully as because it contains all necessary information about the pdf. And you must be careful not breaking any existing function while fixing or adding something. We don’t have much time. So we don’t want you to reconstruct the code from scratch. We can go over the pdf together and I can tell you what features are implemented and how with what reason. LIST OF ISSUES TO BE FIXED: 1-First thing to fix; is this major problem of merging the parts together and having a successfully generated one piece pdf. Current code had a problem of memory exceptions. The reason was that the coder was trying to merge the whole pdf in memory. He couldn’t manage to find an alternative way (maybe he did but it’s not finished) In the last test we didn’t have a memory error but received another one. Error was: Application pool exceeded its job limit settings. Check it attached ([login to view URL]) Note that you may need to provide us details of modifications on the application pool. Also last coder implemented a mail sending function which lets us know if pdf is generated successfully or not. You can find the error mail it sent attached aswell (Error Reading Inside MergePdfFiles().txt) 2-This website has its own application pool on the IIS. But as the pdf generation is a very resource consuming operation, other pages of website become unresponsive while pdf generation is on. This issue is probably fixed at the moment. But we need you to check and inspect it. If this is an issue we expect you to fix it. 3-After generating the pdf we have to look in to small details like for example maybe it is necessary to add 10px to the header height and etc... As because we don’t have a final pdf generated we are not able to make a list of these requests. But as we have been working on most of them previously, there should be very minor issues left to fix. We are expecting that you will be fixing these minor issues within this bid request, without asking for extra money. (If some serious issues appear to be fixed, then we will open a new bid and pay extra of course) 4-User is shown a certain message (ajax-asp:label) while the pdf generation is going on. (Like: pdf is being generated). When the generation is over change the message to “pdf generated successfully?? or if an error occurs change the message to “pdf not generated) Also note that as because pdf generation takes more than 1 hour html timeout occurs. You must also prevent a display error because of this. (I believe some code is implemented for some of these functions but it’s not working properly). There is also a javascript error that we get after 1 hour period. Probably related to this part of code . You can find it attached. ([login to view URL]) 5-After successful pdf generation there will be a simple record update performed on the db. (We will provide you the details. This is something to the after finishing everything.) 6- Note that this pdf is being generated both for web and print distribution. So we need to generate two versions. First we generate the full quality, 300dpi print version. And then compress this version to a 72dpi web version. Probably the current code only has the functions for print quality version. You have to write the necessary code for generating the web version. 7- Sometimes we are experiencing Application Poll problems. Necessary IIS configurations are made. So we need a solution on the code side. Please test and find the reason for this error and apply necessary fix after discussing it with us. (this is a sitewide problem and not related with pdf creation) Error is: “Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.?? Note: If you check with me before applying logical additions and changes to the code it will be good so we can minimize the misunderstandings and mistakes. Very Important note: if we don’t have successfully generated pdf as a result of your work, you will not be payed. Payment will only be made if we see the successfully generated pdf on our server. Timeframe and Future Work: The pdf generation issues must be finished in 3 days. Strict. Not even 1 more day more. I must note that; this pdf generation is the first phase and we will proceed to the second phase as soon as this one is finished. There will be some page additions to the pdf which will need some logical operations. After we finish these you are going to adapt your final pdf code to 3 other pdfs as well (with small changes). So including this one there will be 3 bids and as a result 4 pdfs produced (and their web version). So it can be expected that the total amount of 3 bids can possibly get up to 800$. If you are not willing to do all 3 bids please do not bid on this one. Also this work is urgent. If you don’t think that you can get the job done in 3 days, don’t bid. (Other two bids will be short on time as well. So it’s possible to earn 800$ in a week of work. But it will be a long week.) We can communicate over msn messenger for fast communication. All necessary site files will be sent to you. You are responsible to test your development on local and provide installation instructions for making the code work on server. You may also be asked to carry the working copy to the server yourself for final testing. You will be provided ftp access to the website root for final testing. Do not forget that this website is live on server and has visitors. You must not change any data on db. And website must remain accessible during work hours of Turkey. You must be able to provide yourself a testing environment. (with IIS 6, MS SQL 2005, Asp.Net 3.5) After successful test on server, bid will be considered as finished and you’ll receive payment. You can find the [login to view URL] page and other info attached to the bid request. Please do not bid without reviewing them. I’m waiting for your opinions on the code. These opinions will have significant influence on making the selection of coder for the project.