How to serve .RTFs

Question

I support a web-application that displays reports from a database. Occassionally, a report will contain an attachment (which is typically an image/document which is stored in the database as well).

We serve the attachment via a dynamic .htm resource which streams the attachment from the database, and populates the content-type based on what type of attachment it is (we support PDFs, RTFs, and various image formats)

For RTFs we've come across a problem. It seems a lot of Windows users don't defaultly have an assocation for the 'application/rtf' content-type (they do have an association for the *.rtf file extention). As a result, clicking on the link to the attachment doesn't do anything in Internet Explorer 6.

Returning 'application/msword' as the content-type seems to make the RTF viewable when clicking on the link, but only for people who have MS Office installed (some of the users won't have this installed, and will use alternate RTF readers, like OpenOffice).

This application is accessed publicly, so we don't have control of the user's machine settings.

Has anybody here solved this before? And how? Thanks!

Answer 1

Wordpad (which is on pretty much every Windows machine) can view RTF files. Is there an 'application/wordpad' content-type?

Alternatively, given the rarety of RTF files, your best solution might be to use a server-side component to open the RTF file, convert it to some other format (like PDF or straight HTML), and serve that to the requesting client. I don't know what language/platform you're using on the server side, so I don't know what to tell you to use for this.

Answer 2

Use application/octet-stream content-type to force download. Once it's downloaded, it should be viewable in whatever is registered to handle .rtf files.

Answer 3

In addition to the Content-Type header, you also need to add the following:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=my-document.rtf