APEX - Cocoon PDF Generates as attachment (issue)

Question

Hello,
[bumped as issue has come to light again, does anyone have any ideas???]
We have Application Express 3.01 with PDF printing configured the Apache Tomcat + Cocoon way. Our APEX instance runs over https on an internal network.
Everything works with no issues, except that in the environment that we are running, browsers are IE configured with an advanced option "Do not save encrypted pages to disk" set (for security reasons related to another application).
PDF's are served as attachments, this means that when you click the "Print PDF" link you are presented with an Open/ Save dialogue. If you click "Open", the file fails to open (as it has not been saved to disk). Everything is fine if you click "Save" then subsequently open the file. It's the same deal with CSV files using the standard APEX CSV generation. If we turn off the security option in IE, it all works fine, even the "Open", but rolling this change out to users is not an option.
This issue comes down to the HTML that the PDF document is being wrapped in. The content-disposition must be being set to "attachment", whereas in this situation we would prefer it set to "inline" which would mean that the PDF opens in the users' browser.
We have tried adding a map:act type="set-header" line to the sitemap.xmap to set the content-disposition but it seems to have no effect, presumably because APEX fires off XML and FO to cocoon, gets back a PDF then generates the HTML to send back to the user.
Other methods we've considered are:
- Apache mod_rewrite entries to rewrite the content-disposition on the Apex web server.
- Adding a before header application process to try to intercept the html and rewrite it manually
Neither of the above are getting us anywhere, does anyone have any ideas? If no-one has any ideas, can you explain how you get from posting a FLOW_XMLP_OUTPUT_R request to getting back a PDF and whether there's anything along the way that could be tapped into?
Many thanks in advance for your assistance.
Matt

Answer 1

Matt,
On this note, it probably also makes sense to mention that with APEX 3.1 we introduce a PL/SQL API that gives you much broader control over what is generated how and the method it's made available to the client. You'll get the ability to retrieve the PDF in a BLOB directly on the server, store in your own tables for later download or send via email attachment. You'll also get the ability to write your own download process using after-submit page processes. And you can have combinations of your own XML with your own stylesheets, or combine report queries with customer stylesheets at runtime, or just simply retrieve the results of pre-defined report queries / report layouts in BLOBs.
I'll talk about this much more on my Blog once 3.1 is out, and will provide whitepapers, how-to's etc
Regards,
Marc