Hi Andrew,

Welcome to ASPNET newsgroup.
From your description, you have a certain pdf file which need to be exposed
to client users through asp.net web page. And you also need to protect the
pdf file from being accessed by unauthenticated users, yes?

If so, I think we can just put the user login UI on the web page so let the
user input username password and in the submit button's postback event, do
the user validation. If the user is a valid user, we just retrieve the PDF
file's binary stream and write it out to the page's response stream.

We can store the PDF file on physical dir as a pdf file or in database.
Anyway, it's better not to put the file in web application's virtual dir so
as to prevent it be browsed by unexpected users. Here is a kb article
mentioned streaming out binary file (on disk) to asp.net page's resposne.

#How To Write Binary Files to the Browser Using ASP.NET and Visual C# .NET
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=306654

Hope helps. Thanks,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support

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microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet:133569