Serving PDFs via servlet

We have a simple servlet that fetches a PDF from a database and sends it back
with the content type set to application/pdf.

This works fine in most cases but in some IE browsers the pdf displays as
a blank page or a little image icon. It will display properly if you save
the file to disk then open it or if you turn off web integration on Acrobat4
so that it loads up acrobat in a separate window.

The Adobe site suggests using Netscape (not acceptable) or saving the pdf
to a file on the web server and sending back a dummy HTML page with a refresh
pointing to the file (works but messy).

Curiously using a sendRedirect() does not work but sending back a dummy page
with a META line to redirect does work????

Has anybody come up with a better solution.

We are using Apache 1.3.6 on an HPUX box.

Richard McLaren
richardmclaren@hotmail.com

Come across this one in a couple of places and seems to be a problem
more to do with the browsers. I was using xsl-fo to generate the pdf.

All worked fine from a swing application but when trying to access the
same document on the web I had to add ?dummy=.pdf to the end of the url
and it worked fine. (I'm using Acrobat5).

Almost seems that the browser is ignoring the mime type.

Owen

Richard McLaren wrote:
> We have a simple servlet that fetches a PDF from a database and sends it back
> with the content type set to application/pdf.
>
> This works fine in most cases but in some IE browsers the pdf displays as
> a blank page or a little image icon. It will display properly if you save
> the file to disk then open it or if you turn off web integration on Acrobat4
> so that it loads up acrobat in a separate window.
>
> The Adobe site suggests using Netscape (not acceptable) or saving the pdf
> to a file on the web server and sending back a dummy HTML page with a refresh
> pointing to the file (works but messy).
>
> Curiously using a sendRedirect() does not work but sending back a dummy page
> with a META line to redirect does work????
>
> Has anybody come up with a better solution.
>
> We are using Apache 1.3.6 on an HPUX box.
>
> Richard McLaren
> richardmclaren@hotmail.com
>

Hi,

well I had my problems too with the combination servlet-PDF. I found out
that it is a problem in IE when serving the PDF in HTTPS mode and only when
WebLogic is the server. Tomcat does not have that problem.
HTTP works fine, just set the "Content-Type" to "application/pdf".

Ash

Owen Thomas <owen.thomas@simpl.co.nz> wrote:
>Come across this one in a couple of places and seems to be a problem
>more to do with the browsers. I was using xsl-fo to generate the pdf.
>
>All worked fine from a swing application but when trying to access the
>same document on the web I had to add ?dummy=.pdf to the end of the url

>and it worked fine. (I'm using Acrobat5).
>
>Almost seems that the browser is ignoring the mime type.
>
>Owen
>
>Richard McLaren wrote:
>> We have a simple servlet that fetches a PDF from a database and sends
it back
>> with the content type set to application/pdf.
>>
>> This works fine in most cases but in some IE browsers the pdf displays
as
>> a blank page or a little image icon. It will display properly if you save
>> the file to disk then open it or if you turn off web integration on Acrobat4
>> so that it loads up acrobat in a separate window.
>>
>> The Adobe site suggests using Netscape (not acceptable) or saving the
pdf
>> to a file on the web server and sending back a dummy HTML page with a
refresh
>> pointing to the file (works but messy).
>>
>> Curiously using a sendRedirect() does not work but sending back a dummy
page
>> with a META line to redirect does work????
>>
>> Has anybody come up with a better solution.
>>
>> We are using Apache 1.3.6 on an HPUX box.
>>
>> Richard McLaren
>> richardmclaren@hotmail.com
>>
>
>