Question

The Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in is being used to accept form input from a user. After a user has completed the PDF form and clicked its submit button, the form data is posted to an Asp.Net page that accepts the data, stores it and returns a message as HTML.

This works fine in Acrobat Reader in Firefox. Within Internet Explorer, our targeted browser, after the PDF form has been submitted, the data is accepted by Asp.Net, saved to disk and, by way of a packet sniffer, I can see that the HTML response is served, but IE hangs after the PDF is unloaded like it’s trying to load the response, but never does.

I’ve determined that the problem occurs with IIS6 and IIS7, with or without SSL, on Windows XP and 7, and with Adobe Reader 9 and 10; what considerations am I overlooking?

Answer 1

This behavior seems to occur in Internet Explorer when the Acrobat Reader plug-in sends the HTTP POST followed by an alert dialog box being invoked with something like the following:

app.alert({
    cMsg: "Error! Try again!",
    cTitle: "Acme Testing Service"
});

The issue seems to stem from running a script after the HTTP POST has been sent; reordering the sequence of events has resolved the issue I was experiencing.