Solr Collection PDF display problem

Ah, ok. Your problem is the link you are showing to the user (file:///C:/inetpub/wwwroot/cfdocs/Newspaperfiles/Madison_County_Record/2013/05/18/Madison_County_Record_20130518.pdf).

That will not likely work in a browser. Not saying it can’t work, or will never work. But it’s not likely what you really should be using. Let me explain.

Look closely at it: a) it asks for a file:/// directive. Note that traditional browser URLs use http://. Now, it’s not that file:// is wrong. It’s that it’s not appropriate here. It would only work if the path pointed to existed on the user’s machinee. Do they have a folder called c:/inetpub/wwwroot? No. That’s on YOUR server. (And even if this was an intranet application, they would not see that file in that location, as it’s on the server. You’re not offering a path that would work from even other machines on the same network.)

I suspect what you need is to convert this URL into a “web accessible one”, and the good news (well, good and bad) is that the file you are naming is in fact in a web accessible directory, your inetpub\wwwroot. Assuming you can serve a test.cfm page from c:\inetpub\wwwroot using http://yourdomain/test.cfm, then you can serve these files as http://yourdomain/cfdocs/Newspaperfiles/Madison_County_Record/2013/05/18/Madison_County_Record_20130518.pdf.

Try that URL in your browser. If it works, then you just need to modify your code to provide THAT url to the user. To do that, you’d need to do some manipulation of the variable (you’re not showing us) which displays that link. If you’d share the line of code that outputs that link, we can provide code that will work. (Since you may be combining variables or functions to get the location you show now, I don’t want to just guess what might work.)

Hope that helps.

BTW, I said above that there was good news/bad news about this PDF being in a web accessible directory. It’s good for your need to just offer a link easily. It’s bad that if this is content that you may think you want to control in some way, such as to only show “some files” to “some people”, beware that anyone who sees one of these links (when we get it working) will be able to guess at other PDF file names. Just beware. (If you need to solve that, there are still other solutions, but they are way beyond the scope of this Solr forum.)

Indeed, as may be clear by now, your issue here (the problem you raised) isn’t really a Solr question at all. It’s more about fairly basic web and CF programming. Now, I don’t say that to embarrass you. Hey, we’ve all had a challenge like this some time in our coding lives. It’s just part of getting started with any particular challenge. My point though is that in asking for help here, in the Solr forum, you have limited your audience of help. Note that you’ve not gotten much (nor rapid) response. There are basic CFML forums and indeed several subforums for various aspects of working with CF. Just saying you may want to consider raising future questions there, if they really are of ongoing questions about basic application development. Hope that’s helpful.

/charlie