PDFRefresh

Learn how to use the PDFRefresh config.txt  directive to manage how PDF documents display in EZproxy.

PDFRefresh is a position-dependent directive that interacts with other PDFRefresh directives. Typical placement is toward the top of config.txt.

Due to a flaw in the handling of redirects between Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat, starting point URLs that point to PDF documents fail to display properly if EZproxy performs a normal browser redirect to trigger the display of such documents. To compensate, EZproxy normally generates an intervening page that uses a browser refresh to avoid this behavior.

The PDFRefresh directive can be used to indicate which browsers do not need to receive this intermediate page, and which should instead perform a normal browser redirect. PDFRefresh is followed by either a + (special refresh processing is required) or a - ( special refresh processing it not required) and then a case-insensitive user agent match string that can use the wildcards * (match 0 or more characters) and ? (match exactly one arbitrary character).

The first PDFRefresh directive that matches the browser's user agent determines how EZproxy should handle the request. If the browser's user agent does not match any PDFRefresh directive, the default behavior is to require special refresh processing.

Example

Sample use to require special processing only if MSIE appears in the user agent string:

# Special processing if MSIE appears in the user agent
PDFRefresh +*MSIE*
# but no special processing for anything else
PDFRefresh -*

Related directive

PDFRefreshPre & PDFRefreshPost