Displaying PDF files on browser

[Prakash Dwivedi]

hi,
I want to show PDF file in the browser, while i am able to show the pdf file while i am hard-coding the name of the pdf file(like C:\abc.pdf), the same code doesn't work when i am specifying the file name at runtime, Intrestingly the same code(specifying file name at runtime) works in Netscape 7.0, while it doesn't work on other browsers(not even at Netscape 6). In IE 6 it opens Adobe Acrobat Reader, but than it throws the error "Can't open file,***.fdf"(*** keeps changing).I am able to view other pdf documents, from other sites on IE(so the problem is not in IE setting, i believe). I am attaching my code, I will be very thankful if anybody can help

import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.io.*;
public class DISCReportServlet extends HttpServlet 
{
  private static final String CONTENT_TYPE = "text/html; charset=windows-1252";
  public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException
  {
    super.init(config);
  }
  public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException
  {
    response.setContentType("application/pdf");
    ServletOutputStream out       = response.getOutputStream();
    String loc_o_fileName         = (String)request.getAttribute("PDF_FILE_NAME");
    InputStream loc_o_fin         = new FileInputStream(loc_o_fileName);
    int i                         = 0;
    while((i=loc_o_fin.read()) != -1){
      out.write((char)i);
    }
    loc_o_fin.close();
    out.flush();
    File loc_o_pdfFile          =   new File(loc_o_fileName);
  //  loc_o_pdfFile.delete();      
   
//    out.close();
  }
  public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException
  {
      doGet(request,response);
  }
}

Thanks

[Mark Spritzler]

Good question. I have been dabbling myself in PDFs from Servlets but haven't had much luck or really time to get it to actually work. I was actually using XML with XSTL and XSL:FO with Apache's Fop, it says you can create PDFs dynamically without saving the actual PDF file.
It looks like you already have the PDF file on your Web server.
I have seen another product that I thought looked really good, but again you would be making the PDF on the fly. But that product was iText, I think that was the name of the product.

FOP has a Driver class that can be used to take a PDF file and send it to the Output stream.

 
    public void renderFO(InputSource foFile,
                         HttpServletResponse response) 
                         throws ServletException {
        try {
            ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            response.setContentType("application/pdf");
            Driver driver = new Driver(foFile, out);
            driver.setLogger(log);
            driver.setRenderer(Driver.RENDER_PDF);
            driver.run();
            byte[] content = out.toByteArray();
            response.setContentLength(content.length);
            response.getOutputStream().write(content);
            response.getOutputStream().flush();
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            throw new ServletException(ex);
        }
    }          

Not sure fi that will help you in any particular way, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents worth in.
Mark

[Ryan Bailey]

XML with XSTL and XSL:FO with Apache's Fop works great for creating PDF files on the fly. I will be using that in a production environment. Using XSL:FO is great when you need to apply a stylesheet to an xml file. Are you dealing with xml? If not, then using XSL:FO might be an over kill since you have to parse the xml file, and then run it through Apache's FOP processer. I am storing the file but as Mark mentioned there is a while to generate an OutputStream and send that stream to the response.
I ran into a problem like this before. Try saving your results to a ByteArrayOutputStream and sending that to the OutputStream. For some reason bytes were being lost when I did it any other way.
Good luck,
Ryan

[Sean Sullivan]

I wrote this article about PDF's, Java servlets, and iText
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/06/18/dynamic_files.html