Question

In an ASP.NET 2.0 application, using Google Chrome 13 on Windows.

My app dynamically generates a PDF report when the user browses to a particular aspx page. For the most part, things work fine on various browsers.

However, on Chrome, when Chrome’s PDF viewer is being used, the following can happen :
– the user presses the floating diskette icon on the bottom right hand side of the viewer to save the PDF document. The file is saved with the aspx page’s name. e.g. Report.aspx .

If I open that downloaded aspx file in Adobe Reader, it opens up ok as a PDF document. But is there a way to get chrome to default the name of the file to save to have a “.PDF” extension ?

EDIT :

The code for the report generation page looks something like this :

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Response.Clear();
    Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
    byte[] data = GenerateReportHere(); // dynamically generate PDF report

    Response.AddHeader("Content-Length", data.Length.ToString());

    Response.BinaryWrite(data);
    Response.Flush();
    Response.End(); 
}

Note that I don’t want to use a “Content-Disposition” header like :

    Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=Report.pdf");

because that causes the browser to ask the user if they want to download the file. In Chrome it won’t display it in its PDF viewer – just gives the user the chance after downloading to open the file using whatever program they have associated with the “.pdf” file extension.

Answer 1

You should try using content-disposition header while streaming the PDF file to the browser. For example,

HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=[ReportName].pdf");

// Code to stream pdf file content to the client
...

For more info about content disposition, see

• http://www.jtricks.com/bits/content_disposition.html
• http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-reschke-rfc2183-in-http-latest.html