On the server side, how are you delivering this document?
Are you using requestDispatcher.forward?
Are you streaming the document?
Or, are you just adding the document name to the URL and letting Tomcat's default servlet stream it?
Is "doc_to_open" just something you added when posting here or was that part of an actual URL?
Does this same behavior occur with other browsers, like FireFox?
Do you have either the LiveHttpHeaders or the FireBug plugin installed in Firefox?
If you do, can you look at the headers and see if the server is sending a Content-Type header?
If it is, what is its value?
yes checked the http headers
content-disposition is attachment ... how to over ride it on the tomcat server any configuration we can make to change it to inline.. i suppose which might open it with out the dialog box.
I'm not seeing this behavior in Tomcat 6 on my machine.
Can you try running this small application and see if the same behavior exists?
http://www.souther.us/att.war If not, can you create a small application that reproduces this problem and make it available for download?