Sending pdf as attachment causes undefined error in Chrome browser

Question

Using Django, I am sending a pdf file from the server. If I send it as an attachment using:

response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=test.pdf'

it downloads fine, but in the Chrome console there is an error:

GET http://12.345.678.09/vpas/?print_confirm=true undefined (undefined)

If I send the pdf without setting the Content-Disposition of the response, there is no error. What is the cause of this error and how can I get rid of it?

This is the http (from Firefox - couldn't get as many details from Chrome):

http://12.345.678.09/vpas/?print_confirm=true&vpa_id_to_print=2355

GET /vpas/?print_confirm=true&vpa_id_to_print=2355 HTTP/1.1
Host: 12.345.678.09
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110420 Firefox/3.6.17 GTB7.1 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: sessionid=fdabaccd2a731fd459cd5d6c3f5004f1
Cache-Control: max-age=0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.5.33
Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 00:59:48 GMT
Content-Type: application/pdf
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Cookie
Content-Disposition: attachment;
Set-Cookie: sessionid=fdabaccd2a731fd459cd5d6c3f5004f1; expires=Mon, 02-May-2011 01:59:48 GMT; Max-Age=3600; Path=/

This is the http I could get from Chrome:

Request URL:http://12.345.678.09/vpas/?print_confirm=true&vpa_id_to_print=2355
Request Headers
Accept:application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/534.24 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.60 Safari/534.24
Query String Parameters
print_confirm:true
vpa_id_to_print:2355

Answer 1

The issue is caused by Chrome 16 following the correct RFC standard.

You have to surround the file name with double quotes. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=103618

In your case, it would be ...

response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="test.pdf"'

Also important, which you've done already, using semi-colons to separate the values rather than commas. This could cause the same outcome in Chrome

Answer 2

I just encountered this error today in rendering dynamic pdfs, after a recent Chrome upgrade. Previously the code had worked fine in all browsers.

My work-around was to remove any embedded spaces and commas in the filename. There may be other meta characters to remove, but this fixed the problem for my users.

For the benefit of the search engines, the error appearing in Chrome:

Duplicate headers received from server

Error 349 (net::ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_CONTENT_DISPOSITION)

The response from the server contained duplicate headers. This problem is generally the result of a misconfigured website or proxy. Only the website or proxy administrator can fix this issue.