Opening a PDF through a servlet

Question

I have been trying to open a PDF document using a servlet for quite a while now and I am making no progress.
I have gotten the file to pass through to the browser at least 3 different ways, however, when I access the servlet using IE I get an error. The interesting thing is that when I refresh the page, the PDF file opens just fine.
Is there any trick to doing this? I can use the redirect directly to the PDF file:
res.sendRedirect("http://localhost:9080/test.pdf");The problem there is that I need the users to bookmark the servlet, not the PDF. In fact I do not even want the user to know where the PDF is.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Dear Mark,
Perhaps this will help you:
public void doService (HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
String contentDisposition = "attachment; filename=\"test.pdf\"";
response.setHeader ("Content-Disposition", contentDisposition);
javax.servlet.ServletOutputStream sos = response.getOutputStream();
java.io.File file = new java.io.File("test.pdf");
java.io.FileInputStream fis = new java.io.FileInputStream(file);
byte[] data = new byte[1000];
while (fis.read(data) != -1)
sos.write(data);
sos.close();
I have not tested the code, but I think you got the idea.
Greetings Michael