Since my last post I have made a few modifications to
the PDF generation,
the main one being that
the files are now dynamically renamed so that they reflect
the name
of the case study instead
of all being called PDF.PDF which was not a very helpful filename, I just wanted to get something live last week, so decided that something was better than nothing :)The issue with
the filenames comes down to
the way that
the PDF's are being generated by using an alternative template in Umbraco, this means that all you need to do is add " /pdf " to
the end
of a case study URL and it will create a PDF version
of the case study.
The down side is that your browser will merrily download
the file and save it as PDF.PDF because that is
the name
of the last part
of the URL.What you need to do is set
the content-disposition header to be equal to
the name you would like
the file use, Darren Ferguson mentioned this on
the Change
the name
of the PDF forum post.We have used
the same technique for downloading dynamically generated excel files, so I thought it would be useful to create a small macro to set both this header and also to set
the caching headers to prevent any caching issues, I think in
the past we have experienced all possible issues, including various issues where IE behaves differently to other browsers when you are using SSL and so
the below code should work in all situations!The template for
the PDF alternative template is very simple:<%@ Master Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/umbraco/masterpages/default.master" AutoEventWireup="true" %><asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolderDefault" runat="server"> <umbraco:Macro Alias="PDFHeaders" runat="server"></umbraco:Macro> <umbraco:Macro xsl="FO-CaseStudy.xslt" Alias="PDFXSLFO" runat="server"></umbraco:Macro></asp:Content>The following code snippet is
the XSLT macro that simply creates our file name and then passes
the file name into
the helper function:<xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:variable name="fileName"> <xsl:text>Vizioz_</xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/@nodeName" /> <xsl:text>_case_study.pdf</xsl:text> </xsl:variable> <xsl:value-of select="Vizioz.Helper:AddDocumentDownloadHeaders('application/pdf', $fileName)"/> </xsl:template>And
the following code is
the helper function that clears
the current response and adds all
the appropriate headers:public static void AddDocumentDownloadHeaders(string contentType, string fileName){ HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response; HttpRequest request = HttpContext.Current.Request; response.Clear(); response.ClearHeaders(); if (request.IsSecureConnection & request.Browser.Browser == "IE") { // Don't use
the caching headers if
the browser is IE and it's a secure connection // see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323308 } else { // force not using
the cache response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "private"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "no-store"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "must-revalidate"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "max-stale=0"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "post-check=0"); response.AppendHeader("Cache-Control", "pre-check=0"); response.AppendHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache); response.Cache.SetNoStore(); response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(-1)); } response.AppendHeader("Expires", DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-1).ToLongDateString()); response.AppendHeader("Keep-Alive", "timeout=3, max=993"); response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\""); response.ContentType = contentType;}I will write another blog soon with some more details about XSL-FO and how to create
the PDF's dynamically.Please do re-tweet if you find this interest :)
