Cannot open dynamic PDF files in Internet Explorer

Question

I upload & save PDF in SQL. Then people can open that PDF in web browser (IE). Today I've updated Acrobat Reader and I cannot open same PDF in web browser. I can save it to desktop then open it. There is no [Open] button in dialog box and it says file might be corrupted

Name: admin.pdf

Type: Adobe Acrobat Document, 37,8 KB

From: domain.com

*

Dynamically generated PDF' link is like below: http://domain.com/admin.asp?cmd=Download_PDF&id=20112

I did every solutions on both Adobe & Microsoft websites. I cannot open PDF files directly in IE8.

My ex-ASP code was:

    Response.ContentType = rsFile("filetype")
    Response.BinaryWrite rsFile("filedata")

Then I just changed it to make PDF as downloadable file, now I can -at least- download & open it in external Acrobat Reader (dialog box shows [Open] [Download] [Cancel] buttons):

 Response.Buffer = TRUE
    'Response.ContentType = "application/pdf"
    Response.ContentType = rsFile("filetype")
    Response.AddHeader "Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" & filename & ".pdf"       
    Response.BinaryWrite rsFile("filedata")

possible duplicate of PDF created on HTTP request won't open in Internet Explorer — Dijkgraaf
The solution on the duplicate issue managed above actually resolved the issue for me by setting the Cache-control to max-age=1 rather than no-cache — Dijkgraaf

MikeGaribaldi MikeGaribaldi · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-03T20:58:42

I just stumbled upon this exact same problem today, and dug up a solution.

We also have a site that's serving up pdfs stored in an SQL database. When the aspx page tries to serve up the pdf, it displays exactly the same dialog you're describing. It only affects IE8 (no one here has any other version of IE I could test); the most recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, all loaded the pdfs in the browser without incident.

So after I found your question, I dug around some more, and found the following:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/792591

Starting with adobe reader 9.4.2, a bug was introduced relating to character sets, such that if the Content-Type has a charset value, adobe will end up looking for a registry key that doesn't exist.

I did what jspraul suggested in response 17, and added:

Response.Charset = null;

Like you, I had simply set my Content-Type to application/pdf, but because my Response.Charset had a value of UTF-8 by default, adobe was looking for a registry key related to UTF-8 and failing to find it. Hopefully adobe will patch this at some point, but that should fix your problem in the interim.

Cannot open dynamic PDF files in Internet Explorer

2 Answers