Quirky stuff here,
The current setup works fine for Firefox 3.6 and IE 8 but balks on earlier IEs. The files are PDFs, .doc files, and other binaries but up to several MB:
A. the users' problem is a minor IE7 quirk: it works to download files from clicking links, but if you use the URL instead then the browser stops after a fraction of a second. Refreshing or hitting Return again downloads it fine.
B. the major problem is when the download progress dialog pops up but then gives the "Internet Explorer can not download XYZ from (website)" error box. This is what we see when we try testing - so 'major' is that we cannot directly reproduce it.
We've tried combing the net and tried various different headers for the last day, but even Microsoft seems conflicted about which HTTP Headers should be used when, and few are specifically talking about SSL (but MS's KB says SSL headers are treated differently)...
One thing that worries me is that Cache-Control, Pragma, and a couple others never show up in Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders when we or send_file set them. I'm only certain they're set because RSpec tests verify them.
While it seems that checking IE's internet option "Do not save encrypted documents..." lets the downloading happen for at least some of the severe errors (B), that seems like an odd work-around instead of a global solution.
1) Has anyone experienced this problem?
2) What is the fix with HTTP Headers or send_file settings?
Thanks!
--- recent complete headers through Live HTTP Headers, supposedly with Expire=-1 --- HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.1
X-Runtime: 4
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="thefile.pdf"
Status: 200
Content-Type: application/pdf
Set-Cookie: ... Vary: Accept-Encoding
Last-Modified: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:03:46 GMT
Content-Length: 3962465
Connection: close