I do the following (call it whatever you want :-|, the reasons are beyond
technical):
I have an applet that calls the servlet that generates the pdf stream. The
applet then saves the stream as a file on the local HDD and opens the file
with Acrobat Reader. Of course you need to check whether the file is already
there, open etc.
HTH
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Larsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, May 14, 2002 12:01 PM
Subject: REPOST: Problems serving PDF to Netscape browsers
>I've made no progress on this, so let's try again. My dynamic
>PDF is working perfectly with MSIE 4, 5, and 6, but I'm still
>having problems with Netscape (ver 4 and 6) and the Acrobat
>(ver 4 and 5) plugin. I've tried this on various client machines.
>
>With both NS4 and NS6, I just get a blank screen when I request
>my dynamic PDF. They don't even show the Acrobat toolbar. The
>similarities end there.
>
>In NS4, the first request does not launch the AcroRd32.exe
>process. In fact, it fails to read the entire output of the
>servlet and Tomcat (4.0.3) spits out a Broken Pipe exception
>to the logs. If I hit "Reload", however, I get my PDF and the
>plugin works. According to the Apache logs, the first unsucessful
>request returns 6144 of 21212 bytes before the broken pipe. On
>the "Reload", the Apache log shows TWO requests returning the
>full 21212 bytes and Netscape displays it in the plugin.
>
>In NS6, the first request DOES launch the plugin executable, but
>that's as far as it gets. "Reload" doesn't help. My Apache server
>reports the correct number of bytes for the full PDF request, so the
>data seems to be getting to the browser. No exceptions are thrown
>by Tomcat.
>
>In both NS4 and NS6, it works if I configure Acrobat to be launched
>as an external application instead of a plugin. But it is not a
>viable option to impose that configuration on our customers.
>
>I use a servlet mapping that sends requests for xxx.pdf to my
>servlet, thus the browser sees a ".pdf" filename. I also use
>setContentType("application/pdf"). There are known problems
>with MSIE and unknown ContentLength with PDF so I create the
>PDF in a ByteArrayOutputStream so I can know and set the
>ContentLength before writing to response.getOutputStream().
>
>To take the dynamic nature of the PDF out of the equation, I was
>able to reproduce these problems --sometimes-- when serving static
>PDF files via Tomcat.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jeff Larsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 1:44 PM
>Subject: Problems serving PDF to Netscape browsers
>
>
>> I'm running out of hair to pull out here...
>>
>> My ultimate goal is to serve dynamically generated
>> PDF documents generated with iText. I've got it working
>> just fine with MSIE. However, I was just getting blank
>> pages with Netscape (and it wasn't even showing the toolbar
>> for Acrobat). With NS6 I could at least see that it started
>> an AcroRd32.exe process, but NS4 didn't even get that far.
>>
>> So, I did some tests to rule out some variables. I grabbed
>> a handful of pre-generated PDF files and stuck them on
>> my Apache 1.3.23 server. All browsers could display the
>> PDFs just fine. Then I set up Tomcat 4.0.3 to server the
>> same files directly without going through Apache. MSIE worked,
>> but both NS browsers gave a blank page with no Acrobat plugin
>> toolbar. Again NS6 managed to start an Acrobat process, NS4
>> didn't.
>>
>> My production environment is Apache 1.3.23 and Tomcat 4.0.3
>> connected with mod_jk.
>>
>>
>>
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