Saturday 03 July 2010 6:12:16 am

Hey Jordan!

I generally have three options for content creators on how they want to handle showing pdf files. One, as you mentioned would be to force a download of the file using the content/download module, the second one is forcing the browser to view the file, rather then forcing the download. I do this by linking directly to the file, however I notice the way a browser handles the file at that point is completely different on all browsers and is even handled differently on different operating systems.

It sounds like you were able to utilize the content/download functionality to actually view the file in the browser, is that correct? What OS/Browser combo did you get that to work on?

One other option that I thought I'd at least mention is using the Google PDF viewer to ensure the browser shows the PDF online rather then forcing the download. This is a nice way to ensure that your site is consistent across all browsers and OS's. I do this by constructing the link using the .filepath property, but I wrap it in a link to the Google PDF viewer. The final link ends up looking like this - http://docs.google.com/viewer?url='http://domain.com/var/path/to/file.pdf&embedded=true&width=700&height=1050'

And if you're feeling really froggy, you can even open that as an iframe directly in a modal window on the site when the link is clicked. It's a nice little addition to any site.

Hope that's somewhat helpful to you or someone else.

Tuesday 06 July 2010 3:34:01 am

Oh wow, that's interesting. I hadn't even thought about how linking directly to the PDF in the var folder would bypass the normal permissions in place with eZPublish, but that does make a lot of sense. I'll have to take a look at file.ini and the PassThrough directive...thank you for the pointer.

Definitely let me know about the Google PDF Viewer and if you have any questions on it's functionality. I agree it's a pretty smooth solution with all of the browser/os consistencies!

Tuesday 06 July 2010 7:19:42 pm

Thanks for the input Peter, I've actually run into that issue as well, but only when trying to show the viewer in an iframe.

My solution was initially to open the pdf viewer in an iframe, within a modal window, but I ran into the issue that you pointed out in that posting. Apparently the doc viewer doesn't provide a compact privacy policy which is a standard in IE. I was actually disappointed to read that Google left something relatively simple out of their implementation. I understand not supporting older versions of IE, but unfortunately this makes their viewer completely non-functional in IE in an iframe.

Ah well, what I ended up doing was a browser check using jquery. If the browser was IE, I opened the pdf viewer in a pop-up window, if not, I used pretty photo to open the viewer in an iframe embedded into a modal window. Here's the simple js if anyone is interested.

UPDATE: moved the code to pastie...

http://pastie.org/1033684