Rails PDF Generation with Prawn in IE7

Question

I\'m using Prawn and Prawnto to generate a PDF in a Ruby on Rails app (Rails version 2.2.2) which works great and generates PDFs happily and sends them to the user to downlo

Answer 1

I'm having this problem as well. When I try to request the same PDF without SSL on Internet Explorer (7 or 8) it works, but if I request it with SSL, it doesn't work...

We think we may have tracked this down to headers that IE is expecting when downloading a PDF. I haven't checked the prawnto source code to see what headers it set, but we are likely going to use some Rack Middleware to inject the headers we need:

# add headers for PDF downloads in IE
# PDFs not downloading correctly via SSL in IE
# solution: add some headers for PDF downloads
# http://marc.info/?l=php-general&m=124301243808544&w=2
class RackAddPdfHeadersForIe
  def initialize( app )
    @app = app
  end

  def call( env )
    @status, @headers, @body = @app.call env
    add_headers if is_pdf? and is_internet_explorer?        
    [@status, @headers, @body]
  end

  def is_pdf?
    @headers['Content-Type'] =~ /pdf/
  end

  def is_internet_explorer?
    @headers['User-Agent'] =~ /MSIE ([0-9]{1,}[\.0-9]{0,})/
  end

  def add_headers
    @headers['Content-Description'] = 'File Transfer'
    @headers['Content-Transfer-Encoding'] = 'binary'
    @headers['Expires'] = '0'
    @headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
  end      
end

So I tried this, thought it would work, then found that indeed it still didn't work.

So I ended up doing this, for whatever reason, this worked for me:

class ReportsController < ApplicationController

  def payroll_summary
    respond_to do |format|
      format.pdf do 
        response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment;filename=\"#{action_name}.pdf\""
        response.headers['Content-Description'] = 'File Transfer'
        response.headers['Content-Transfer-Encoding'] = 'binary'
        response.headers['Expires'] = '0'
        response.headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
        render
      end  #format.pdf
    end #respond_to
  end #payroll_summary

end