Thanks for the great response.  This should take care of all my issues.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andre Van Klaveren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 2:39 PM
To: Struts Users Mailing List; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Output PDF

I'm assuming that your browser client is IE.  If so, the reason your
Action is being called twice is because of a "feature" in IE 4.x+.  If
your application returns data that is to be handled with an ActiveX
control (ie Adobe Acrobat Reader) the browser sends additional
requests to the server.  In IE 4.x and 5 it actually sends three
requests.  For IE 5.5+ it sends two.

Assuming that your using IE 5.5+, the first request is the original
request (duh), but then IE sends a second request to get the
content-type.  Who knows why they can't figure this out on the first
request ;)  This second request has it's userAgent header set to
"contype".  You can solve this problem and increase the performance of
your application by writing a Servlet filter that sits in front of
whatever Actions you have setup to serve PDF content.  Have this
filter look at the userAgent header of each request.  If it's set to
"contype" just send an an empty response back to the client with the
content type set to "application/pdf".  Simple as that.

Now, the reason your getting an exception in the second code snippet
you provided is because after you do your forward the JSP calls
response.getOutputStream().  This is done behind the scenes but you
can see it if you look at your generated Servlet code.  This method
can only be called once during the lifestyle of the request, hence
your exception.

It's generally a bad idea to have a JSP produce binary content anyway.
 They were designed for Text or HTML output.

I wrote a generic/reusable Servlet whose sole purpose in life is to
write binary content back to a client.  I called it
BinaryOutputServlet.  You put your binary data (byte[]) and the
content type of the data in the request scope and forward to it.  It
gets the data and content type out of the request and writes it back
to the client.  It can be used for any type of data this way.  I would
recommend doing something similar since Actions are really for
control.  By writing back to the client from an Action you are
violating the MVC model anyway.

I hope this helps.  Oh, and you can read all about the "feature" of IE here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q293792

Virtually,
Andre Van Klaveren, SCP


On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:01:48 -0600, Brad Balmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm using Jasper to create PDF's through my Actions and cannot figure out
a
> good way to export the resulting byte[] to the user.
> 
> Currently the tail end of my Action class looks like this:
> 
> byte[] reportBytes = null;
> 
> File jasperReport = new File(location);
> 
> try {
> 
> reportBytes = JasperRunManager.runReportToPdf(jasperReport.getPath(),
> parameters, dataSource);
> 
> log.info("Found : " + reportBytes.length);
> 
> } catch (JRException e) {
> 
> e.printStackTrace();
> 
> }
> 
> response.setContentType("application/pdf");
> 
> response.setContentLength(reportBytes.length);
> 
> ServletOutputStream ouputStream = response.getOutputStream();
> 
> ouputStream.write(reportBytes, 0, reportBytes.length);
> 
> ouputStream.flush();
> 
> ouputStream.close();
> 
> return(null);
> 
> This will display the pdf, but the action class itself somehow get called
a
> second time as the above log statement is displayed twice.
> 
> I also tried to set the byte[] on the request and forward onto another
page
> which does:
> 
>       <%
> 
>             byte[] reportBytes =
> (byte[])request.getAttribute("REPORT_BYTES");
> 
>           response.setContentType("application/pdf");
> 
>       response.setContentLength(reportBytes.length);
> 
>             ServletOutputStream ouputStream = response.getOutputStream();
> 
>             ouputStream.write(reportBytes, 0, reportBytes.length);
> 
>             ouputStream.flush();
> 
>             ouputStream.close();
> 
>       %>
> 
> But this complains about: getOutputStream() has already been called for
this
> response
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> 


-- 
Virtually,
Andre Van Klaveren
SCP


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