Internet Explorer error using Asp MVC 4.0 FileResult

Question

I have the following code, deployed on a https Asp site, build with MVC 4.0:

public FileResult ANotSoWorkingFunction(string filePath, string fileName)
{
 pat         


        

Answer 1

I think I also ran into your problem.

I am also running IIS 7.5 and downloading a PDF through an action on an HTTPS request. For reasons I have yet to isolate, IIS 7.5 seems to be appending no-cache="Set-Cookie" to my Cache-Control response header regardless of what I set the Cache settings to on the Response. This was causing the fairly well documented no-cache issue on IE6, IE7, and IE8.

To resolve this, I made a small wrapper around the FileContentResult that cleared the headers, called the parent, then set the Cacheability to 'Private'. This side-stepped IIS 7.5's insistence to add no-cache="Set-Cookie" to the header, and the file downloaded properly in all browsers I tested. If you want to emulate what I did, first, here's my FileContentResult wrapper.

public class PdfContentResult : FileContentResult {

    public PdfContentResult(byte[] data) : base(data, "application/pdf") { }

    public PdfContentResult(byte[] data, string fileName) : this(data) {
        if (fileName == null) {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("fileName");
        }

        this.FileDownloadName = fileName;
    }

    public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) {
        context.HttpContext.Response.ClearHeaders();

        base.ExecuteResult(context);

        context.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Private);
    }
}

Then I added an extension method to my ControllerExtensions so that it would be simple to find:

public static class ControllerExtensions {

    public static PdfContentResult Pdf(this Controller controller, byte[] fileContents, string fileName) {
        return new PdfContentResult(fileContents, fileName);
    }

}

Finally, within the Action, I did the equivalent of this:

public ActionResult MyGeneratedPdf() {
    byte[] myPdfContentInByteStream = GetPdfFromModel();
    return this.Pdf(myPdfContentInByteStream, "MyFile.pdf");
}

Obviously, if you're downloading all kinds of data types, you might not want to bind the workaround so closely to PDF.