topic Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024 in ArcGIS Online Questions

Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

CaseyWilson1 — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:13:38 GMT

At the City of Springfield, we share authoritative pdf maps, like regulatory zoning, with the pubic via our ArcGIS online Hub. Previous to today, February 29, 2024, the pdf behavior when in AGOL and the Hub, is that you have the choice to Open and then download a pdf document. Today, the pdf we uploaded can only be downloaded from the Hub and when in AGOL.

We would like people to be able to view the pdf and not have to download the pdf. Did something change with the February 2024 AGOL update? Is there a setting I need to consider?

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

JoshThue — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 22:25:02 GMT

this is exactly what i just spent most of the day dealing with, thinking there must be something wrong w/ the pdf, etc. what an absolute nightmare this application gives me every time i'm unfortunately forced to use it

sidenote: my favorite bug is clicking a date in the calendar when adding an event, only to have it select the day prior to the date i selected. that's the most fun bug i've experienced until today's PDF disaster

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

JoshThue — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 22:35:47 GMT

(view in My Videos)

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

RebeccaRichman — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 23:40:35 GMT

Hi @CaseyWilson1 and @JoshThue,

Thanks for the feedback! It looks like this is a expected change, but I have passed your concerns on to the developers, so they are aware of your frustrations.

Rebecca

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

RandallWilliams — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:23:23 GMT

Hi All,

This was an intentional change, and I'll tell you why.

In almost all web applications, PDFs are uploaded to the app by a trusted source. ArcGIS Online is different in that we allow our many users to upload their own PDFs and share them broadly. When PDFs are generated and uploaded by a trusted source (eg: the site owner), we can be reasonably assured that the PDF has not been changed with a text editor to introduce malicious JavaScript.

If an unsuspecting user opens a file containing malicious JS that is hosted on our ArcGIS.com domain while they are currently logged in, a browser's cross domain restrictions are effectively defeated. This leaves our users vulnerable to a, common, dangerous, easily exploited and typically severe type of attack called "stored cross-site scripting".

Adobe also recognizes this risk, and offers options to prevent JS execution in Acrobat. Browser plugins also have the ability to block JavaScript - but how effective is relying on an end user to enable this functionality?

We understand that this is an unpopular change.

We strive to achieve a risk aware balance between "security" and "usability". This style of attack is well known and has been thoroughly documented. This is not a hypothetical - it is a real, persistent threat that we are responding to.

We working to identify technologies that can identify and sanitize malicious scripts from PDFs and other files, but this is difficult challenge because PDF files are designed to use JavaScript code. We are also looking into PDF viewers that are either sandboxed or do not support JavaScript at all.

We appreciate your feedback regarding this change - it does not go unheard. We look forward to providing a better, more secure option to providing an in-line experience for serving PDFs in a future release.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

CaseyWilson1 — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:25:53 GMT

Thanks @RebeccaRichman for passing this along to the developers.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

CaseyWilson1 — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:31:06 GMT

@RandallWilliams Thanks for the explanation. Look forward to your continued efforts at pdf viewers. It would have been helpful to have that documented, but now it is! Maybelike if I want to share a pdf with the public, I should post it on the Enterprise Portal and share it as a collaboration. I'll look into that.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

RandallWilliams — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:34:05 GMT

Heard. Pinged support to provide a kB.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

RandallWilliams — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 02:01:33 GMT

That could work - I haven't tested that behavior. If your ArcGIS Enterprise is public facing and the PDF is public anyway, you can just share the URL "by reference" instead of via collaboration, too.

I've noticed that Firefox gives me actions for how I want files to be used.

For me at least, Firefox downloads the file locally then opens the downloaded file. (eg: file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/doc.pdf). That's cool and a lot less dangerous.

Chrome and Edge just download the file but don't open them. I haven't looked for an extension that will do it for those browsers. YMMV.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

Amanda__Huber — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:39:10 GMT

Adding our voice to this. This is a very frustrating change that broke a large portion of our public maps workflow. It was not communicated to us, the customers and came by surprise after this last AGOL update. From this thread it sounds like others are just as surprised.

Please re-consider finding a solution that's safe to host. In the meantime we will be scrambling to resolve our broken maps that are consumed daily by the public.

Best,

Amanda Huber

Three Rivers Park District

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

JamesBurton1 — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 17:55:05 GMT

Well dang. That changes my whole plan for our website. I'm glad you understand this an unpopular change... wish we could have found an alternative solution other than breaking an established functionality with zero notice.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

JamesBurton1 — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 19:02:20 GMT

I'm moving all my PDFs to google cloud where they do open instead of download. A pretty simple work-around.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

Amanda__Huber — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 19:31:20 GMT

That's great for you, but most government organizations are unable to utilize/host in the Google Suite. I know this is an issue for quite a few gov. orgs here in the Midwest.

So far we haven't found another good workaround (no go for Dropbox for our org), but we're still looking.

Would love to hear what others are using to host until/if Esri resolves this issue.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

CaseyWilson1 — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 17:34:43 GMT

@Amanda__Huber We have an Enterprise Portal where the functionality to "View" PDFs still exists. We may just host our PDFs on the portal and link to them from our Hub, which is about the same as a Dropbox or google cloud really. I just hope that future portal updates don't remove that "View" functionality.

I tried a collaboration by reference from portal to AGOL and that doesn't seem to work for pdf's, just copies them over.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

ThomasBucher — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:04:13 GMT

Hi @RandallWilliams ,

Do you know if a PDF viewer has been added to Hub? I only ask because I logged into one of my Hub sites and was able to view my documents directly in the web page. The odd thing is that this was only the case for some of our Hub sites while some others were still forcing a download.

Just wondering if there's been any updates over the past two weeks.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

Amanda__Huber — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:21:48 GMT

We did some testing on this.
It appears that any PDF that has been updated since the recent AGOL release is now requiring download everywhere and in ArcGIS Hub as well. If it hasn't been updated, it appears to still be 'viewable' in the browser.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

ThomasBucher — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 12:35:23 GMT

I see. Thank you for your reply Amanda, that would explain the behavior I'm seeing with our PDFs.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

RandallWilliams — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 16:01:11 GMT

The change that we put in was to set the content-disposition header on the uploaded PDF to "attachment" instead of "inline".

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition

We did not go back and retroactively change PDFs uploaded before this update.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

davepete22 — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 15:54:47 GMT

This is a very unwelcome change. A heads up would have been greatly appreciated, changes entire workflows as others have mentioned.

Re: Unable to Open PDF in AGOL only Download- New as of Feb 29, 2024

davepete22 — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 16:00:55 GMT

For my situation, I did find a workaround. I was using PDF's linked to in Survey123 and instead of saving my Word doc as a PDF, I saved it as a JPEG instead and that is able to be viewed in browser instead of downloaded. Hope this is an option for some of you.