PDF Bookshelf – A responsive MVC bookshelf app (Content Management)

What is PDF Bookshelf

PDF Bookshelf is an ASP.NET MVC 5 application for managing pdf documents. It lets you upload pdf files and display them in a nice look alike bookshelf. The ui layout is pretty much self explaining. With the “Documents” navigation item you can upload, edit and delete documents or add new attributes or categories. With the “Users” navigation item you can add, edit or delete users.

The features

• PDF Bookshelf Automatically creates cover previews of uploaded documents (Ghostscript must be installed)*
• Place every document in categories you define by yourself
• Add document attributes (e.g. Author or Summary) and fill them on the document
• Download the document

*sometimes Ghostscript can’t create a proper preview file, then you can upload your own preview file

Which technologies are used?

• ASP.NET MVC 5
• Entity Framework 6 Code first (with Repository pattern)
• jQuery
• Bootstrap
• Ghostscript

The user administration

Pdf bookshelf also includes a user administration to create users with three different roles:

1. Administrator Role (has access to everything including user management)
2. Editor Role (can upload and edit documents and their attributes)
3. User Role (can download and view documents and their details)
4. No Role or not logged in users (can only see documents, but not download)

Of course you can remove the log in part and make PDF Bookshelf public or integrate the user administration of your own project.

How to run PDF Bookshelf

1. Open up the Bookshelf solution
2. Make sure you have LocalDB up and running
3. Start debugging Bookshelf
4. Optional: Install Ghostscript from the ThirdParty folder, if you are using another version of Ghostscript, edit the path in Web.config.

The demo

Open preview link from above to access the demo application. Log in (click right on “Account”) with the following log in credentials to edit documents:

Username: admin
Password: admin

Please do not wonder, this user is not changeable and out traffic and copyright reasons the PDFs you can download are fake and have only one page.

What is included

• full source code of the application

Changelog

• 1.0 (2015-06-04)
  • initial release

Download PDF Bookshelf – A responsive MVC bookshelf app (Content Management)