PDF's not displaying in browser when using Adobe 6.x Reader and others

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

We have a web application that serves medical data to hospitals. Our application uses Aspose.Words to open a Word 2003 Document (*.doc), perform a mail-merge of the data into the document, then displays the document as a PDF in the Browser:

doc.Save("Report.pdf", SaveFormat.Pdf, SaveType.OpenInBrowser, Response);

This worked fine in development, but when we published, we got complaints that people were getting blank windows instead seeing the PDF embedded in the browser. I was able to replicate this locally by uninstalling Reader 8.x and installing Reader 6.x. (We also have reports of clients with IE6/Reader6 who upgraded to Reader 8 but still have the issue).

I tried several things, such as using Response.End(), saving the PDF locally and setting the contentType to application/pdf, streaming it out myself, etc. Nothing seems to help.

If I save the PDF to the hard drive and open it locally in Reader, it opens just fine.

Our next attempt will be to create an *ashx handler and see if that helps, but I’m running out of options. Has anyone else had this problem? Any resolution?

2

Hi

Thanks for your request. The Save(“out.pdf”, SaveFormat.Pdf, SaveType.OpenInBrowser, Response) method works like the following code.

Aspose.Words.Document doc = new Aspose.Words.Document();
Aspose.Words.DocumentBuilder builder = new Aspose.Words.DocumentBuilder(doc);
builder.Write("Hello world!!!");
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
doc.Save(stream, SaveFormat.Pdf);
Response.Clear();
// Specify the document type.
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
// Other options:
// Response.ContentType = "text/plain"
// Response.ContentType = "text/html"
// Specify how the document is sent to the browser.
// Response.AddHeader("content-disposition","attachment; filename=MyDocument.doc");
// Another option could be:
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "inline; filename=out.pdf");
// Get data bytes from the stream and send it to the response.
byte[] bytes = stream.GetBuffer();
Response.BinaryWrite(bytes);
Response.End();

You can try using this code for testing, if the problem still exists, then the problem is not related to Aspose.Words but to your environment configuration.
Best regards.

3

A small addition to the code above.
Writing the whole stream buffer directly to the output stream might actually result in a corrupt file, use to following instead:

byte[] bytes = stream.GetBuffer();
Response.OutputStream.Write(bytes, 0, stream.Length);