I have a requirement where I want to show the file preview to the users.
There are various file types which are supported like; .pdf, .xlsx, .doc, .rar, .jpeg, .png and many more.
When user clicks on the preview it should open the file in popup where preview of the file is shown to him. User can Zoom-in, Zoom-out, Download the file. Just as you can see into gmail for attachment preview.
Please, can anyone guide me to any relevant library or helpful resource for the same.
Thanks in advance
There are two main ways you can do this.
1) Server-side: Render previews once server-side (on file upload) into jpg/png images, and store the previews on the server. This is the easiest to implement on the client side, but requires extra storage on the server.
2) Client-side: Render the previews 'live' with javascript in browser, this reduces the amount the server has to do/store, but does require the client to fully download the file in-memory before it can render the preview, which for large files could be an issue. Also, you would need javascript libraries included for likely each individual file type, since most libraries will target one specific file format.
Server-Side is probably the recommended way to go. What are you using for your web server?
You are looking at creating document viewer.
Belive me its big work as browser does not understand these formats. Browser can render images directly on canvas but it does not know how to render the other files. So, any file other than image formats, one need to save them temporarily on server and then stream on the browser and show them using the respective file viewer.
You can convert doc and xlsx files to pdf and show these files using pdf viewer (http://ngmodules.org/modules/ng-pdfviewer). There are plenty of document converters available on internet (however you will need to check the licensing terms as most of them are GPL licensed, hense can not be used in commercial projects).
If you want to save this work then go for third party server those take all paint to convert documents in html5 such as https://crocodoc.com/why-crocodoc/
You can also try using google doc viewer google doc veiwer
This question is fairly broad. I'm not going through all the steps of how to implement an attachment viewer directive, but here are some pointers you might find useful.
To allow the user to download the file, you simply put a download link somewhere. If you are hosting the attachment on Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or some other cloud storage service, check their documentation. If you're downloading the files from your own server, make sure to set the Content-Disposition HTTP response header to attachment; filename="ORIGINAL_FILENAME", where ORIGINAL_FILENAME is the file name you want to user to see in the save dialog that appears when they click the download link.
Now on to the viewer.
For PDF files, I'd use pdfJS. There's an angular directive for it here.
You could look at something like CloudConvert for other files, to convert ehm to a PDF, and then displaying them in pdfJS, but then you probably want to store the PDF on your server as well, in addition to the original files, which requires extra storage. You might also be able to use the Google Docs viewer, or Office 365 viewer, as described in this answer.
