Viewing PDF in IE fails on some servers

[jzhumanig]

Hey all,

I've got a script that delivers a PDF document to the browser. On the staging server it works in all cases we've tested, but on the client's live server it causes some problems - but only if you're using IE...

I've tested it in Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera and it works fine. In IE 6.0 in Win2k, it asks for the application to use to open the PDF document (we choose Acrobat Reader 5.0) and then AR5 says that the document has errors in it and it doesn't display.

Some details about the environments:

Working system:
Debian Woody, Apache 1.3.27, PHP 4.2.3

Non-working system:
Red Hat, Apache 2.0.47, PHP 4.3.3

About the script:
The script takes a number of possible input variables via QS, searches against the database, and returns the file with the proper headers set. One of the filetypes is PDF, and the headers that should be output are as follows:

header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false); header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Content-Type: application/x-pdf");
header("Content-length: {filesize in bytes}");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename={filename.pdf}");

I would like to assume that the proper headers are being output since it works for me when not in IE, but if IE is crapping out - especially if it's asking what to use to handle the file - then I'm guessing the headers aren't complete...

here's a link to the script:

http://vlsida.eecs.umich.edu/getFile.php?s=4&sid=25e13405b4645042ffb7c2b6ebcde9d7

Anyone got any ideas what might be causing this? I don't have complete access to the live server, but I can get any additional info if needed...

Thanks in advance for any help
-Justin

[craigh]

I experienced a similar problem using this class which does not use the pdflib library, but the solution may be similar.

In the end, I needed to save the pdf file to the server in a cache directory (e.g. mynewfile.pdf) then redirect the broswer to the file. I had to do this because IE apparently has some problem with the URL if it doesn't end with ".pdf". Give it a shot! Good luck.

[harlowhair]

I had a similar problem, and to get around it, just created a very simple php file which takes ext as an argument on the command line and pipes the file into the browser - this worked on every platform and server that I've tested it on so far:

if( isset($_GET["ext"] ) )
{

 $pdf = $_GET["ext"];

 header("Content-Type: application/pdf"); 
 readfile("./$pdf");  // output the pdf file
 exit();
}
else
{
  echo "Please go back to the list of pdfs and choose one to download.";
}

[jzhumanig]

Thank you both for the suggestions, but you hint that the problem exists entirely on the browser side. This would make sense if the problem was consistent across servers. It works correctly on one server yet the same browser accessing the same code served off another server (with a mildy different environment) doesn't work correctly. This tells me that the problem, though triggered with a particular browser, is not entirely the browser's fault.

I made a few changes to my script that seem to have resolved the problem for a few of my testers. The script no longer serves the "Content-Disposition: attachment;" header, so IE will try to open it natively. I also changed the mime-type from application/x-pdf to application/pdf.

I am waiting to hear back from the rest of my beta testers and I will post here again if the problem persists. Thanks again for your input!

-Justin