Printing in a browser-fronted environment

Fri Mar 31 14:20:51 PDT 2017

Ken (or anyone): Do you know if a job with a custom, registered, 
content-type, arriving in a browser will automatically be sent to the 
registered application on the client machine?

Would that have any advantage over basing it on the URI header, as I 
proposed?

On Fri, 31 Mar 2017, Ken Cole via Filepro-list wrote:

> Bob,
>
> We use options 1, 2 and 3.
>
> Your proposal certainly has merits.
>
> I agree with Brian on setting content type. We do the same regularly.
>
> Ken
>
> On Sat, 1 Apr 2017 at 07:15, Brian K. White via Filepro-list <
> filepro-list at lists.celestial.com> wrote:
>
>> Content-type may be set a couple different ways.
>>
>> If the file is being served by a cgi, the a cgi may write whatever kind
>> of http headers it wants, including content-type.
>>
>> If the file is being served by the web server directly, then you can
>> define new custom content types in the mime-types file, or by special
>> httpd.conf directives, (which probably means .htaccess directives can do
>> it also)
>>
>> But for the sake of simplicity I'll show the two most common/basic ways
>> to get a mime-type set
>>
>> A) cgi. In place of a plain url to a file, you have a url to a cgi
>> script that squirts a file at the client.
>>
>> The cgi might look like this:
>> ...cgi-bin/login.vnc:
>> ---
>> #!/bin/ksh
>> printf "Content-Type: VncViewer/Config\n\n"
>> # [...]
>> cat ${TEMPLATE}.vnc
>> printf "host=%s\r\n" $HOST
>> printf "port=%s\r\n" $PORT
>> ---
>>
>> The only http header in this case is "Content-Type: VncViewer/Config".
>> http header is nothing more than whatever lines are first emitted by the
>> script (any script, any number of lines) until the first empty line.
>> Everything after the first empty line is the content. So the 2nd "\n" on
>> the printf makes the empty line which ends the headers and starts the
>> content.
>>
>>
>> B) mime-types. Alternatively, the web server can be told to recognize
>> files by their filename extensions, and send a specified content-type
>> matched to a file extension. They are defined in mime-types, which might
>> appear in a few different common places on the server depending on the
>> servers apache config. (Other web servers like nginx will have some
>> equivalent but I don't know their details)
>>
>> So for instance on my opensuse boxes, the file is in /etc/mime-types,
>> and I have these lines added to the end:
>> VncViewer/Config vnc
>> application/facetwin fwt
>> application/mstsc rdp
>> application/vnd.aljex.at at
>>
>> There is VncViewer/Config again. If I had a static foo.vnc file sitting
>> on the server and had a url to it, there is no cgi shell script to write
>> headers. The web server itself generates a few http headers for the
>> response when it sends the requested file, and this tells the web server
>> to use VncViewer/Config instead of text/plain or
>> application/octet-stream for any *.vnc files.
>>
>> C) I'm pretty sure there are yet other ways you could define the
>> behavior you want even more specially by httpd.conf and .htaccess rules,
>> but I just don't happen to know those details off hand.
>>
>> The CLIENT OS can also recognize a file by it's extension even if the
>> web server doesn't send the right content-type, but that is unreliable.
>> That is why you sometimes get .csv files that show up as text in the
>> browser instead of downloaded and opened by your default spreadsheet
>> app, or sometimes for example it works in IE but not in Firefox, for the
>> same file from the same server to the same client.
>>
>> --
>> bkw
>>
>>
>> On 3/31/2017 1:24 PM, Bob Rasmussen via Filepro-list wrote:
>>> On Fri, 31 Mar 2017, Kenneth Brody wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is it possible to have a new "Content-Type", such as
>>>> "application/X-PrintWizard", which could be returned as the result of
>>>> a "normal" HTTP link?
>>>
>>> I don't know. I believe the content-type is determined by the web
>>> server, but I don't know how it does so. Do you know this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> ....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.
>>>
>>> personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
>>>  company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
>>>           voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
>>>             fax: (US) 503-624-0760
>>>             web: http://www.anzio.com
>>>  street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
>>>                  10240 SW Nimbus, Suite L9
>>>                  Portland, OR  97223  USA
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
  company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
           voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
             fax: (US) 503-624-0760
             web: http://www.anzio.com
  street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
                  10240 SW Nimbus, Suite L9
                  Portland, OR  97223  USA