Excel sheet garbled when in portal and rendered in browser: ok on file-sys.

Question

Hi,
We are facing a strange problem. Our WebLogic Portal App uses the JExcelAPI to generate an Excel spreadsheet when users click on a link to view the sheet. This sheet, when it opens in browser, appears garbled (special chars all over etc). However, the same file, when written to a local file instead of being written to the browser, works just fine!
We set the following response headers:
response.setContentType(contentType);
response.setContentLength(length);
response.setHeader("Pragma", "public");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "max-age=0");
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", createAttachmentFilename(name));
We also set the @page directive, like so:
<%@ page contentType="application/vnd.excel" %>
Given that the file-based excel sheet is ok, we are thinking this problem is due to the way portal handles the response etc...can anyone please help figure this out? We are using JPF-based portlets.
I can paste more code if needed.
Thanks in advance,
Vik.

Answer 1

where are you printing the bytes out? If you are doing it within a portlet, this is wrong , it must be standalone.(you cannot change the the mime type of an included portlet page). If you want to do it within the portlet you must open a new link to a page/servlet that will print out the bytes (outside the Portal framework)
if you have a standalone page(or servlet) and you are still facing this problem , use firefox and livehttpheaders or equivalent and post the request and response headers. If everything looks as it should be, then use Fiddler or any other proxy and inspect the actual bytes you are getting and compare with the file on file system bytes .
regards
deepak