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On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Eric wrote: > > > Unfortunately IE's behavior is weird. The first time someone tries to > load > > one of these URL nothing happens. When someone tries to load another one, > it > > loads just fine. When they re-try the first one, it loads. We are banging > > our heads against the wall here at Catholic Pamphlet Central. Networking > > issue? Port issue? IE PDF plug-in? Invalid HTTP headers? On-campus versus > > off-campus issue? > > Thank you for all the replies. > > We'er not one hundred percent positive, but we think the issue with IE has > something to do with headers. As alluded to previously, IE needs/desires > file name extensions in order to know what to do with incoming files. We are > serving these PDF documents from Fedora which is sending out a stream, not > necessarily a file. Apparently this confuses IE. Since Fedora is not really > designed to be a "file server", we will write a piece of intermediary > software to act as a go between. This isn't really a big deal since all of > our other implementations of Fedora are expected to work in the same way. > Wish us luck. > > FWIW, this is true for any and all HTTP servers. Only the client's request specifies a name (as the path component of the request, e.g., /fedora/get/CATHOLLIC-PAMPHLET:1000793/PDF1<http://fedoraprod.library.nd.edu:8080/fedora/get/CATHOLLIC-PAMPHLET:1000793/PDF1> The server's reply does not contain a name at all. It simply specifies what type and, typically, the length of the returned content is. The returned content itself is just a blob of bytes. Your server says "this blob of bytes is a PDF object (application/pdf)", but it doesn't specify the length. Not specifying the length makes the job of the client slightly more difficult, which is why the HTTP/1.1 specification discourages it; it now has to read the stream until the server closes the connection. It is certainly possible that IE's PDF plug-in is not prepared to deal with this situation; and I would certainly fix this first. - Godmar