Question

I have never thought about this before, but is there a way to control what happens when a user clicks a link to a PDF file?

My boss would like to offer two links to do the following:
1. View this PDF in the browser
2. Download the PDF

Is there a way to do this ? I don’t think about these kinds of things, most modern browsers will open a PDF in the browser. If I want to download it, I right-click download. Any way to force the action ?

Thanks

Answer 1

How PDFs are displayed are based on the user’s browser version and configuration. For example Chrome includes a PDF viewer by default, but the user has the ability to change the behavior of the plug-in ( automatically open PDFs, disable, ask the user).

One way to do this is to set the ContentType and Content-Disposition so the browser will know how to handle the request. For example in ASP.NET you would do it like this:

Response.ContentType = “application/pdf”;

Response.AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”, “attachment;filename=filename.pdf”);

Disclosure: I hijacked this code from this article

Let me know if this helps.