Hi

I am a beginner to PDF/FDF and facing this silly behavior from
Internet Explorer I am trying to solve. I see there are many posts
similar to this on the forums here, but couldn't find any answers or
solutions that worked for users. I sure will post my solution once I
find it.

I have a simple Java (JSP) page that returns FDF stream with
content-type: application/vnd.fdf. In Mozilla this page works - by
opening a new browser instance that in turns open the Acrobat inside
the IE-Browser (not sure why this is happening). But this solution
eventually brings up the PDF with the data as set in the FDF stream.

But the same page when tried from IE bring up this, instead:

=======================================================
File-Download

Some files can harm your computer. If the file information below looks
suspicious, or you do not fully trust the source, do not open or save
this file.

File name: mypage.jsp
File Type: Adobe Acrobat Control for ActiveX
From: intranet.myserver.net

This type of file could harm your computer if it contains malicious code.

Would you like to open the file or save it to your computer?

==OPEN== ==Save== ==Cancel== ==More Info==
=======================================================


Clicking on "OPEN" or "SAVE" buttons give the following error window
and the IE closes. The other buttons are of no help.

=======================================================
Microsoft Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer cannot download mypage.jsp from intranet.myserver.net.

Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The
requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try
again later.
=======================================================

When I access the page from Mozilla, I get two requests on the server
- one for my JSP and another for the PDF itself (as referred in the
FDF stream). But when I do this from IE, I get only the JSP request
back to the server but not the PDF request. The JSP page requests both
are returned by the web-server with status code 200 and same
content-length (in this case 2812).

I then changed the content-type from "application/vnd.fdf" to
"text/plain". I could simply access the entire FDF stream in the
browser - both in Mozilla and IE. I could use browser's SAVE feature
to save this into a file - test.fdf. Then I could simply double click
this "test.fdf" and open the PDF with content from the FDF-stream.
Everything worked as expected and as it should in this test.

I am wondering why Internet Explorer is behavior so badly to the
request for this specific content-type from my Unix-Solaris server.

Thank you in advance for any pointers.

-Srinivas

Any chance you are using SSL on the web server that is causing the problem with IE?

Yes, seems like I missed it here. This problem occurs because the data
pages are served thru HTTPS and not HTTP. From what I read so far
there is no solution (an easy one any way). I will post my solution
sometime this week. Thanks.

-Srinivas

Here is how I solved this problem. 

I ended up using FDFMERGE from Appligent.Com to run on the server to
merge form-data with PDF. In fact this worked great for us - as we can
securely deliver the PDF with out having to worry about what kind of
reader is available at the client end and if it is FDF capable or not.

I hope this helps someone out there.

-Srinivas