Android browser won't download pdf file

Question

I have a web app that lets users download a pdf file. It is ASP.NET MVC and it all works fine on desktop browsers, iPhone, Android Chrome, and in a native Android app that overrides the Web View setDownloadListener().

However, the download doesn't seem to work when using the default Android browser. I'm testing on a Galaxy Nexus running 4.2.2 and on a Nexus S 4g running 2.3.7. I have PDF viewer apps installed on both devices.

When I test in Android Chrome, the user sees a "Starting Download..." toast and then a Download complete notification is shown in the status bar. The user can touch this notification to open the file in a pdf viewer. In Android's default browser there is no toast and no download file is saved.

I put wireshark on the network and I see the following request:

GET /appapth/ViewPDF/8383600280757433_11_05_2012 HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.1.117
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
X-Requested-With: com.google.android.browser
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.2.2; en-us; Galaxy Nexus Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Language: en-US
Accept-Charset: utf-8, iso-8859-1, utf-16, *;q=0.7
Cookie: (lots o'cookie data)

and the response is:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Encoding: gzip
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
Set-Cookie: ___TempData=; path=/
Set-Cookie: ___TempData=(lot's o'cookie data); path=/; HttpOnly
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:22:20 GMT
Content-Length: 48244

......YQ.....T...?J.h)...!E.S(lots o'binary data)

As you can see from the trace application/pdf content is downloaded. You can also see that I'm not using the content-disposition header and the response is downloaded with gzip encoding.

Any ideas on why this does not work on the Default Android browser? The user does not have access to the downloaded data and no viewer (or intent) is launched. The response is just silently ignored. (I'm guessing that Android default browser requires the content-disposition or doesn't like Gzip on the download, but I'm just guessing)

Update ----

I removed our action filter that was implementing Gzip compression and I added in the Content-Disposition attachment header. so, MVC code in my controller is like:

public virtual ActionResult ViewPDF(string id)
{
    try
    {
        byte[] pdf = GetPDFContent(id);
        FileContentResult fcr = new FileContentResult(pdf, "application/pdf");
        fcr.FileDownloadName = id + ".pdf";            
        return fcr;
    }

and the Http response is now:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate 
Pragma: no-cache 
Content-Type: application/pdf 
Expires: -1 
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=433_07_05_2012.pdf 
Set-Cookie: ___TempData=; path=/ 
Set-Cookie: ___TempData=(lots o'cookie data);path=/; HttpOnly 
Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:56:07 GMT 
Content-Length: 59069

%PDF-1.3 %.... 13 0 obj << (lots o'binary pdf data)

There is no longer any gzip and there is a content-disposition, but on the Android default browser there is still no visible download.

Update 2 ---

tried the suggestions from https://stackoverflow.com/a/5728859/90236 and http://winzter143.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-handling-of-content-disposition.html and http://androidforums.com/application-development/256987-android-phone-download-issue-asp-net-website.html but I still get the same results.

I have the same problem. The stock android browser and the Dolphin browser fail to download. No problem in other browsers. I've tried all the suggestions you linked too. — Igby Largeman, Apr 02 '13 at 06:26
Found my answer. I hope it helps you. I was downloading in an iFrame and Android browser didn't seem to like that. Add target="_blank" to the and now it works. — Michael Levy, Apr 02 '13 at 13:37
Unfortunately this doesn't apply to me - I initiate my download via form post to a controller action that returns a FileStreamResult. — Igby Largeman, Apr 02 '13 at 21:57
It turns out my issue is due to a bug in the Android browser and Dolphin, which causes downloads to fail on POST actions. I changed my actions to GET as a workaround. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1780 — Igby Largeman, Apr 03 '13 at 01:53

Michael Levy · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-02T14:42:39.253

Found my own answer and it was so much simpler than where I was looking. My page with the download link is in an iframe. Something in the Android default browser loses your download if it occurs in an iframe. I added target="_blank" to the a tag that initiates the download and everything now works fine.

Here is some sample code to demonstrate the the problem and the fix.

<html>
<head><title>Test page</title></head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<body>
    <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/pdfs/Photoshop_On_a_Server_Policy_5-31-2011.pdf">
        Download sample pdf</a><br />
    <iframe src="inner.html" />
</body>
</html>

and inner.html:

<html>
<head><title>test iframe</title></head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<body>
    <p>This does NOT work on Android default browser.
    <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/pdfs/Photoshop_On_a_Server_Policy_5-31-2011.pdf">
    Download sample pdf within iframe</a></p>

    <p><a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/pdfs/Photoshop_On_a_Server_Policy_5-31-2011.pdf"
    target="_blank">Download sample pdf within iframe with target</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Android browser won't download pdf file

1 Answers1

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