This message is only marginally related to webware, but you folks have probably run up against this.
I have a webware site in which I need to produce reasonably good looking printed output. We all know that the current generation of browsers has an extremely high degree of suckage in its ability to render tabular-formatted printed output. So, I decided to use ReportLab to produce PDF files. Overall, I am delighted with the results. I get a huge amount of control and flexibility, and it looks exactly right on everyone's computer. However, I'm not entirely happy with the mechanism. Here's the way I would LIKE it to work. 1. User fills out form, clicks submit. 2. Form fires Webware servlet. 3. Servlet returns magic header that tells the browser "whoops, here comes PDF data". 4. Browser gives familiar "run from here or save to disk" dialog, or else fires Acrobat Reader inside browser. I can't seem to make this happen automagically. What I do now is have the Webware servlet render to a PDF file on the server, then send the browser a redirect to that file. That way, the browser sees the PDF extension on the URL and does the right thing. I don't like this, for several reasons: if I use a single file name, I limit my number of concurrent users to 1 (that's not a problem today, but it will be). If I use generated file names, I have to manage them somehow. I don't really need to retain the PDF files at all. So, is there a way that a Webware servlet can generate something that passes through Apache and looks to the browser as if it were a PDF binary, without using this redirect trick? I tried various permutations of "Content-Type", including application/pdf, but I didn't come up with the right recipe. (One alternative is for me to do an immediate redirect to a Python script that happens to be named "xxxx.pdf"; this also works, but seems sort of illegitimate.) -- - Tim Roberts, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
