IE Annoyance when downloading PDFs

Sean — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:59:52 +0000

I came across this error at work and it took me a good three hours to fix! The problem was when a user tried to download a pdf file from one of our sites in internet explorer. It worked fine in Firefox though! The error message was:

The file could not be written to the cache

Luckily a far low down on Google had a sensible answer which was to add the following code (PHP) before the call to session_start();

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE')) {
    session_cache_limiter("public");
}

Other sites were talking about security settings in versions of IE below 6 but they didn’t really help. I thought I would post this in the hope that it helps anyone else that has the same problem.

Tortoise IT » internet explorer

IE Annoyance when downloading PDFs