IE won't open PDF attachments sent by Team Foundation Server

My development team uses TFS, and by default all work-item attachments open
through IE (in our case, IE 7). When the attachment happens to be a PDF, IE
only gives us the option to Save the file, and not to Open it. We've
confirmed that this behaviour doesn't occur when Firefox is the default
browser, but most of us don't use FF. Someone was good enough to capture the
requests and responses, and they look like this:

HTTP Request command:
GET
//WorkItemTracking/v1.0/AttachFileHandler.ashx?FileID=22&FileName=AgilePro cess.pdf HTTP/1.1

TFS response in HTTP header:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 25278
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
content-disposition: filename=AgileProcess.pdf
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:54:29 GMT

This behaviour (not giving us the option to Open the PDF) is reproducable in
both IE 7 and IE 8. Is it possible to work around this behaviour? Everyone
has Adobe Reader installed, any when we try to open PDF's in IE from any
source except TFS, we have no problems.

Mark wrote on Thu, 2 Apr 2009 03:41:15 -0700:

> My development team uses TFS, and by default all work-item attachments
> open through IE (in our case, IE 7). When the attachment happens to
> be a PDF, IE only gives us the option to Save the file, and not to
> Open it. We've confirmed that this behaviour doesn't occur when
> Firefox is the default browser, but most of us don't use FF. Someone
> was good enough to capture the requests and responses, and they look
> like this:

> HTTP Request command:
> GET
> //WorkItemTracking/v1.0/AttachFileHandler.ashx?FileID=22&FileName=
> AgileProcess.pdf HTTP/1.1

> TFS response in HTTP header:
> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> Cache-Control: private
> Content-Length: 25278
> Content-Type: application/octet-stream
> Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
> X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 content-disposition:
> filename=AgileProcess.pdf
> X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
> Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:54:29 GMT

> This behaviour (not giving us the option to Open the PDF) is
> reproducable in both IE 7 and IE 8. Is it possible to work around
> this behaviour? Everyone has Adobe Reader installed, any when we try
> to open PDF's in IE from any source except TFS, we have no problems.


Can you change MIME mappings in TFS? It's sending Content-Type:
application/octet-stream, it should be sending Content-Type:
application/pdf. octet-stream is supposed to be used only for unknown binary
file types and the default handling for IE in this case is always to ask to
save it.

--
Dan

I'll look into that, but I'm not sure where to begin. I would have assumed
that this was hard-coded into the application, but perhaps that isn't the
case.


"Daniel Crichton" wrote:

> Mark wrote on Thu, 2 Apr 2009 03:41:15 -0700:
>
> > My development team uses TFS, and by default all work-item attachments
> > open through IE (in our case, IE 7). When the attachment happens to
> > be a PDF, IE only gives us the option to Save the file, and not to
> > Open it. We've confirmed that this behaviour doesn't occur when
> > Firefox is the default browser, but most of us don't use FF. Someone
> > was good enough to capture the requests and responses, and they look
> > like this:
>
> > HTTP Request command:
> > GET
> > //WorkItemTracking/v1.0/AttachFileHandler.ashx?FileID=22&FileName=
> > AgileProcess.pdf HTTP/1.1
>
> > TFS response in HTTP header:
> > HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> > Cache-Control: private
> > Content-Length: 25278
> > Content-Type: application/octet-stream
> > Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0
> > X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 content-disposition:
> > filename=AgileProcess.pdf
> > X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
> > Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:54:29 GMT
>
> > This behaviour (not giving us the option to Open the PDF) is
> > reproducable in both IE 7 and IE 8. Is it possible to work around
> > this behaviour? Everyone has Adobe Reader installed, any when we try
> > to open PDF's in IE from any source except TFS, we have no problems.
>
>
> Can you change MIME mappings in TFS? It's sending Content-Type:
> application/octet-stream, it should be sending Content-Type:
> application/pdf. octet-stream is supposed to be used only for unknown binary
> file types and the default handling for IE in this case is always to ask to
> save it.
>
> --
> Dan
>
>
>