Thursday, September 17, 2009

File Download issue with IE over HTTPS

I am currently working on a project where the user can download PDF, XLS and CSV files. These files are dynamically generated within the application and thrown out on the browser when the user clicks on a particular link. This was running like a charm till recently, we decided to move to HTTPS and it stopped working. We were getting a message saying

"The file could not be stored in cache."
"Internet Explorer was unable to open this site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."


After a little googling I found that it is a known issue with IE. Refer to the link below. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815313 But installing a hotfix was out of question. So I went looking for a solution that could be handled through code and here is the solution that seems to work for us and the magic required to satisfy IE
response.setHeader("Pragma", "public");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "max-age=0");