"Save to PDF Link" & IE7

I'm trying to use the "Save to PDF Link" method of the PDFCrowd service. It appears to be working in everything except IE7. In IE7 it's just redirecting to the PDFCrowd home page.

Is this method supported in IE7? If so, what can I check to see if I'm doing something wrong?

To test this I'm having to Remote Desktop to a PC that has IE7 on it, I'm assuming that's not causing the problem, but I thought I'd mention it here just in case. :)

Thanks in advance!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/06/2011 08:39AM by kizmar.

The "Save to PDF Link" relies on HTTP referrer which is not required by the HTTP Protocol.

However, vast majority of browsers in current use send the referrer information. As far as IE 7.0 is concerned, it seems that there is no definitive answer. There are reports that some IE7 installs send the information whereas some installs don't.

Hmm... so what's the quickest work-around if we're trying to use this on a site that has to support IE7 & 8?

Unfortunately, there is no work around. The link requires an http referrer in order to work correctly.

An alternative option to the Save to PDF link is a server side solution which uses our API

To get a better picture we analyzed our logs and here is the result:

• 10% of IE7 requests came without a referrer
• 6% of IE8 requests came without a referrer

There might be other reasons for a missing referrer:

• No referrer is sent when you go from https to http. So one should link to https://pdfcrowd.com/url_to_pdf/ when using the Save to PDF Link on an https page.
• In some cases the referrer can be removed by firewall/security software.

Great info. That will give me a couple things to troubleshoot. Thanks!

For future reference:

We were using JavaScript to throw a confirm() alert to "Save to PDF". That's what was causing IE7 to go into "don't send the referrer" mode. Once I changed that confirm() JS method back to simply clicking on a link, it worked.

Great, thanks for reporting back!