Wednesday, June 16, 2004
FOP PDFs with Internet Explorer
Welp, the webapp trundles steadily along towards being completed. *tear* They grow up so fast...
Notes: Apparently IE5.x and the Acrobat Reader plug-in and up are absolute idiots when it comes to downloading PDFs. It's quite possible for IE to try to open up to 3 concurrent requests to the server for a PDF file -- or for it to not request a Cocoon/FOP generated PDF as a PDF.
The solution? Serialize the PDF inside Cocoon, write it to a file, and then redirect the user to that file. The
I still need to finish populating my PDF with user data -- but I've already populated the first 5 pages (of ~11 or so), so I feel like I'm pretty much on easy street with regard to that.
After PDF population, we worry about authentications and permissions, which could be a bit more interesting...
Notes: Apparently IE5.x and the Acrobat Reader plug-in and up are absolute idiots when it comes to downloading PDFs. It's quite possible for IE to try to open up to 3 concurrent requests to the server for a PDF file -- or for it to not request a Cocoon/FOP generated PDF as a PDF.
The solution? Serialize the PDF inside Cocoon, write it to a file, and then redirect the user to that file. The
<xmap:serialize type="fo2pdf"/> directive will only reliably work for IE for small PDFs. Sad, no?
I still need to finish populating my PDF with user data -- but I've already populated the first 5 pages (of ~11 or so), so I feel like I'm pretty much on easy street with regard to that.
After PDF population, we worry about authentications and permissions, which could be a bit more interesting...
