Opening word document in a browser

Question

Hi Friends,
I am working on a web application which has a websphere as a web server.
I want to open a word document or any other MIME type file in a browser. I know how to open a word document by setting the content type in a response. But I dont want to use that.
I have the same code, on the other server which works absolutely fine without any issues.
In the same code, no content type is set for response as the file is called direcly using "config.getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("FILE PATH")".
web.xml are identical on both the server.
Can anyone please suggest what is the other thing that decides the content type for the file to be opened in a browser?
Thanks & Regards
Ketan

Answer 1

To open an Microsoft Word document, you would set the response object's content type to "application/msword" instead of "application/pdf":
// MIME type for MSWord doc
res.setContentType( "application/msword" );
For an Excel document, use the MIME type "application/vnd.ms-excel". In that MIME type, vnd refers to application vendor that must be included to open the file.
In some cases, the browser doesn't recognize the file's MIME type. That often happens when the required plug-in hasn't been installed for a certain file type. In those cases, the browser will pop up a dialog box, asking the user whether he or she wants to open the file or save it to disk.
Content disposition
An HTTP response header named content-disposition allows the servlet to specify information about the file's presentation. Using that header, you can indicate that the content should be opened separately (not actually in the browser) and that it should not be displayed automatically but rather upon some further action by the user. You can also suggest the filename to be used if the content is to be saved to a file. That filename would be the name of the file that appears in the Save As dialog box. If you don't specify the filename, you are likely to get the name of your servlet in that box. To find out more about the content-disposition header, check out Resources.
In the servlet, you want to set that header as follows:
res.setHeader("Content-disposition",
"attachment; filename=" +
"Example.pdf" );
// attachment - since we don't want to open
// it in the browser, but
// with Adobe Acrobat, and set the
// default file name to use.
If you were opening an Microsoft Word file, you would choose:
res.setHeader("Content-disposition",
"attachment; filename" +
"Example.doc" );