May 14, 2010 – The White Pages

If you’ve installed SharePoint 2010, you may have noticed a change in behaviour of any PDF files that you may have stored. Previously, they would open directly in the browser, but now the user is prompted to save the file to the disk. This is due to a new security feature in IE8 that SharePoint 2010 respects. In order to allow the old behaviour, you must set the browser file handling options to “permissive” as opposed to “strict”.

This change is done at the application level. First, navigate to Manage Web Application within Central Admin, select the application in question, and choose General Settings on the ribbon.

Once in the settings screen, scroll down and find the section for Browser File Handling, and change it to permissive.

It goes without saying that this is less secure, but if you trust your PDF files, you should be good to go. Of course,as always,no warranties, express or implied…

Thanks to Mike Hacker’s Blog where I originally came across this.

UPDATE – SEPT 7 2010

I just ran across a case where this does not fix the problem. PDFs and all file types including HTML were prompting the user for download. This was not consistent, as it was happening in some libraries and not others. As it turns out, it’s a bit of a bug, and document libraries will not always inherit the browser handling attribute.

You can test this by running the following Powershell:

$site = Get-SPSite(“https://mysitecollection")
$web = $site.OpenWeb("/MyWeb")
$list = $web.GetList("https://myweburl/LibraryName")
$list.browserfilehandling

If it returns “Strict”, then you have a problem. The good news is, you can set it:

$list.browserfilehandling = “Permissive” ;
$list.update();

You should probably loop through your entire site collection and set this value to be safe. The powershell to do this can be found on Nerdtastics Tips, which is where I found the fix in the first place.

UPDATE – SEPT 10 2010

As opposed to hunting through your sites to find the problems, I wrote the below PowerShell script that take the URL for the site collection as an argument, and sets the permissive flag on any lists set to strict.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -erroraction SilentlyContinue
$siteURL = $args[0]
$webname = $args[1]
$site = Get-SPSite($siteURL)

foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {
    Write-Host "Inspecting " $web.Title
    foreach ($list in $web.Lists) {
        if($list.browserfilehandling -eq "Strict") {
            Write-Host "Changing " $list.Title
            $list.browserfilehandling = "Permissive";
            $list.update();
            $site.url,
            $list.title,
            $list.browserfilehandling
        }
    }
}

UPDATE – OCT 5 2010

I’ve run into more situations where this doesn’t solve the problem. I created a new post describing them here.

18 Comments

Day: May 14, 2010

Opening PDF Files in SharePoint 2010