Ie7/8: Pdf File Won't Download With Http Get

I'm using a DataGridView to display a list of statements. One of the columns is a LinkButton, which allows you to download that specific statement in PDF format. My code works perf

Solution 1:

Can you try this-

    Response.Buffer = true;
            Response.Clear();
            Response.ClearContent();
            Response.ClearHeaders();
            Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
            Response.AddHeader(
              "Content-Disposition",
              string.Format("attachment; filename={0}",filename)
            );
            // stream pdf bytes to the browser
            Response.OutputStream.Write(estatement.Document, 0, estatement.Document.Length);
            Response.End();

Solution 2:

Here is a post on stackoverflow that I had which sounds like the same problem.

IE8 and lower cant handle the Cache-control header and causes static content such as PDF's to not get downloaded.

Link

Solution 3:

Two things:

1) Clear all of your headers prior to creating your response in your handler. This solved an issue for me cause by Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-100 where the Cache-Control header was getting set to no-cache="Set-Cookie" (see this blog post for more info) :

// snip...if (estatement.Document != null)
{
    context.Response.ClearHeaders();
    context.Response.Clear();
    context.Response.ContentType = "Application/pdf";
    // snip...

2) I'm not sure if this is actually causing any issues, but rather than creating an iframe each time a user downloads a PDF, why not just set the window.location property? This way you're not adding "throw-away" iframes to the document, and the behavior should still be the same:

functionEStatementDownload(fileid) {
    window.location = "EStatementFile.ashx?fileid=" + fileid;
}