Pdf showed in new window. Help needed!

Question

Hi all,
This is my first post (but a thousand read), and i want first to thank you all for all the information i have read in this forums for years.
I have a problem which is giving me more problems that i expected. In my webapp, i want to show a pdf document in a new page of the navigator when a button is pressed. I have discarded the target blank option in the container form because i have others buttons and dont want them to be opened in new windows, just the one that open the pdf.
So, I used another navigation rule to open a new window. This page have to make de pdf in code an send it to the client. I dont know how to execute that code on the load of the page.
The solution i am trying is using a poll that only will be called once and in the pollListener execute that code. The problem is that does not work to send the response to the client in the client. Here is the code of the pollListener:
byte[] file; //Don't worry about it. Contains the file pdf i want to show.
FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
HttpServletResponse response =
(HttpServletResponse) fctx.getExternalContext().getResponse();
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition",
"inline; filename=\"file.pdf\"");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
response.setContentLength(file.length);
ServletOutputStream sos = response.getOutputStream();
sos.write(fichero);
sos.flush();
sos.close();
fctx.responseComplete();
The curious thing is that if i change the content-disposition to atachemement instead inline, it works asking me to download the file, however, i want it to open directly in the new window and is because of that i use content-disposition inline.
I am almost killing myself because of this problem. Anyone can help me?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First of all, you don't need to do this with a workaround using a Poll listener. I assume that one page has a commandButton or commandLink that is used to show the PDF, right?
Set the useWindow property of the button or link to "true".
Set the actionListener property of the button or link to a method in a backing bean that looks something like this:
    public void showPDF(ActionEvent actionEvent) throws IOException {
        //Setup the output
        String contentType = "application/pdf";
        FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        HttpServletResponse response =
            (HttpServletResponse)fc.getExternalContext().getResponse();
        /* Notice that I don't set the Content-Disposition header - inline is default. */
        response.setContentType(contentType);
        ServletOuputStream out = response.getOutputStream();
        /*  Do whatever you need to do to write the pdf to "out" here. */       
        out.flush();
        out.close();
        fc.responseComplete();
    }