View state in our JavaScript PDF viewer

Nutrient Web SDK encapsulates the entire view state inside an immutable data structure. This is accessible for you via the ViewState. This object is a snapshot representation of the current state of the PDF viewer and can be updated using the Instance#setViewState method. Since it’s an immutable data structure, it’s not possible to alter the view state without going through this setter:

// You can update the `ViewState` by calling `setViewState` with the new view state.
const viewState = instance.viewState;
instance.setViewState(viewState.set("showToolbar", false));


// Or by passing in an updater that receives the current `ViewState` as an argument.
instance.setViewState((viewState) => viewState.zoomIn());


// This will NOT work because the `ViewState` is immutable.
instance.viewState.showToolbar = true;
instance.viewState.showToolbar; // => false

The ViewState is implemented using the Immutable.js(opens in a new tab) library. You can refer to the Immutable.Map(opens in a new tab) documentation to find out how to update the record. Here’s a list of common methods:

  • set() Set a specific property:

    viewState.set("currentPageIndex", 2);

  • merge() Update multiple properties at once:

    viewState.merge({
      showToolbar: false,
      viewportPadding: { horizontal: 0, vertical: 0 },
      scrollMode: PSPDFKit.ScrollMode.CONTINUOUS
    });

The benefit of having the complete application state encapsulated into a single data store is that it makes reasoning about the current state very easy; there’s no hidden state you need to be aware of. You can always snapshot the state and apply it at a different point in time to have the exact same visual representation of your document.

You can observe state changes using the ViewStateChangeEvent. This event will be emitted whenever the current view state changes either by the user (via clicking the UI) or via Instance#setViewState. Please refer to the API documentation to learn more about the emitting order of this ViewStateChangeEvent and other more specific events.