android: open a pdf from my app using the built in pdf viewer

Question

This was my original question:

I want to be able to open a pdf file in my app using the android\'s built in pdf viewer app, but i dont know how to

Answer 1

private void loadDocInReader(String doc)
     throws ActivityNotFoundException, Exception {

    try {
                Intent intent = new Intent();

                intent.setPackage("com.adobe.reader");
                intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse(doc), "application/pdf");

                startActivity(intent);

    } catch (ActivityNotFoundException activityNotFoundException) {
                activityNotFoundException.printStackTrace();

                throw activityNotFoundException;
    } catch (Exception otherException) {
                otherException.printStackTrace();

                throw otherException;
    }
}

Answer 2

I was also faced same issue when was trying to display PDF on android device and finally end up with the solution (3rd party PDF library integration)

https://github.com/JoanZapata/android-pdfview

while I have tested multiple libraries for this listed below which are also working,

https://github.com/jblough/Android-Pdf-Viewer-Library

& mupdf which comes with the ndk flavour (https://code.google.com/p/mupdf/downloads/detail?name=mupdf-1.2-source.zip&can=2&q=) and need to extract with NDK and then use it in application as a jar or java etc. nice article to explain the use of this library @ http://dixitpatel.com/integrating-pdf-in-android-application/

Answer 3

Android has a built in framework from Android 5.0 / Lollipop, it's called PDFRenderer. If you can make the assumption that your users have Android 5.0, it's probably the best solution.

There's an official example on Google's developer site:

http://developer.android.com/samples/PdfRendererBasic/index.html

It doesn't support annotation or other more advanced features; for those your really back to either using an Intent to open a full app, or embedding an SDK like mupdf.

(Disclaimer: I very occasionally do work on mupdf.)

Answer 4

You can programmatically determine whether a suitable application exists on the user's device, without catching exceptions.

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW,
        Uri.parse("path-to-document"));
intent.setType("application/pdf");
PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
List<ResolveInfo> activities = pm.queryIntentActivities(intent, 0);
if (activities.size() > 0) {
    startActivity(intent);
} else {
    // Do something else here. Maybe pop up a Dialog or Toast
}

Answer 5

Although this is a pretty old topic, here is a solution for opening a PDF that is in the asset/ folder with an external PDF reader app. It uses a custom content provider: https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-provider

Using this you can define any file to be provided from the assets/ or res/raw/ folder.

Try it! Best and easiest solution I found so far.

Answer 6

In addition to the ones marked as answer you would need these permissions in the manifest.xml

**

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />

**