RE: Work-around for IE 5.5 Bug to display PDF

["Zhou, Wufeng" <wz...@nsf.gov>]

Besides the points made by Steve below, I know for a fact that Microsoft
acknowledged
it's a bug in IE 5.5 that trying to POST PDF will cause a blank doc.

So if the following still does not work, you may want to use redirect or
dispatch 
to a new servlet that send the document back in doGet() method.

Hope this helps.

Wufeng

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Stephen Thompson [SMTP:shag_vt@yahoo.com]
> Sent:	Thursday, April 05, 2001 8:31 AM
> To:	fop-dev@xml.apache.org
> Subject:	Work-around for IE 5.5 Bug
> 
> Hi folks - saw Marina's post yesterday about returning PDFs from a servlet
> causing IE to show a blank doc.  
> 
> >In a nutshell:
> >I have a servlet that generates a pdf file and sends it to 
> >a client in a stream.  This works fine in all the browsers 
> >except IE5.5, which do runs the Acrobat Reader trailer but 
> >does not display anything.
> 
> There is a very reliable work-around to this - tell the browser how big
> the PDF is before you write it to the stream.  Here is my code:
> 
> protected void serveDocument( HttpServletRequest request,
> HttpServletResponse reply, String xml )
> 	throws java.io.IOException, javax.servlet.ServletException
> {
> 	java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream transform = new
> java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream();
> 	
> 	new corning.cds.command.PDFTransform().transformToPDF( 
> 		corning.cds.command.PDFTransform.TYPE_CABLE_DATA,
> 		xml,
> 		transform	
> 	);
> 
> 	byte[] pdfDoc = transform.toByteArray();
> 	
> 	reply.setContentType( "application/pdf" );
> 	reply.setContentLength( pdfDoc.length );   // !!! KEY LINE !!!
> 	reply.getOutputStream().write( pdfDoc);
> 	reply.getOutputStream().flush();
> 	reply.getOutputStream().close();
> }
> 
> 
> Closing the stream at the end was a sometimes fix, but when I added the
> setContentLength line, that gave me 100% reliable.  Of course, the trick
> is that you have to know exactly how many bytes you are writing *before
> you write them*.  Once the first packet has been sent back to the client,
> it is too late to add header information.
> 
> So what you do is write the PDF to a ByteArrayOutputStream.  Then you can
> access the byte array before you send it, meaning you can see exactly how
> long it is. Bingo!
> 
> Hope this helps.
> Steve
> 
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