Question

Here is my issue. I am trying to call a page: foo.php?docID=bar and return a PDF to the screen which is stored as a BLOB in the DB.

Here is the portion of my code which actually returns the PDF:

$docID = isset($_REQUEST['docID']) ? $_REQUEST['docID'] : null;

if ($docID == null){
    die("Document ID was not given.");
}

$results = getDocumentResults($docID);

if (verifyUser($user, $results['ProductId'])){
    header('Content-type: application/pdf');
    // this is the BLOB data from the results.
    print $results[1];
}
else{
    die('You are not allowed to view this document.');
}

This works perfectly fine in Firefox.

However, in IE, it doesn’t show anything at all. If i’m on another page (i.e. google.com), and I type in the URL to go to this page, it will say it’s done, but I will still have google.com on my screen.

I checked the headers for the responses from both firefox and IE. They are identical.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Need more information?

EDIT: If it helps at all, here’s the response header and the first line of the content:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 349930
Content-Type: application/pdf
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cql3n3oc13crv3r46h2q04dvq4; path=/; domain=.example.com
Content-Disposition: inline; filename='downloadedFile.pdf'
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:35:59 GMT

%PDF-1.4

EDIT: Also, the page which pulls out the pdf file actually uses HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Thanks in advance,

~Zack

Answer 1

I figured out what the issue was. It’s an IE bug dealing with IE, HTTPS and addons. (See here)

It was a caching issue. When I set:

  header("Cache-Control:  max-age=1");
  header("Pragma: public");

(see here), the PDF was in cache long enough for the adobe reader add-on to grab it.