Arcemise

Normally, it’s not that hard to insert a pdf file onto a SharePoint page (pageviewer webpart) but if you had more than one pdf to view, it would me just as many pages to display them.  To counter this, I used a query string and a little javascript to dynamically embed the pdf in the page.

First you have to set up your url.  It basically consists of the url of the page plus a query string with the pdf’s name.  Example:

https://www.domain.com/sitecollection/site/pages/viewer.aspx?pdfurl=my pdf file name

Note, you don’t need to have the full url location of the document here.  You’ll add that later into the javascript.  This keeps your urls down to a decent length.  The next code snippet will go in the source of a Content Editor Webpart.

<div id="pdfHolder">No review document selected</div>
<script language="javascript">
	
		var query = window.location.search;
		
		if(query.substring(0,1) =="?")
		{
			//remove the question mark
			query = query.substring(1);
			//split the string into an array based on ampersand locations
			var urlArray = query.split("&");
			//find the string that matches pdfurl=
			for(var i=0; i<urlArray.length; i++)
			{
			
				if(urlArray[i].search("pdfurl=")== 0)
				{
					//grab the url after the pdfURL=
					query = urlArray[i].substring(7);
					//embed the pdf on the page
					document.getElementById('pdfHolder').innerHTML='<embed src="/site/pdfLibrary/'+query+'.pdf" type="application/pdf" width="500" height="650" >';
				}
			}
		}
			
	</script>

The code first declares a div tag called “pdfHolder”.  There’s some default text in place if there isn’t a pdf to load, but it will be replaced once we find a file.  The javascript below that looks at the url to see if it has a query string attached.  If it does, the code then splits up all the query strings attached to the url and puts them in an array.  We cycle through the array until we find string beginning with “pdfurl=” and then we put that string into a variable.

We then have Javascript write an embed tag into the pdfHolder tag. In the embed code, you’ll put the address of your pdf library. The name of the pdf file, which we got from the query string, gets placed here followed by “.pdf”. You can adjust the width and height as need be.