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

[CaseyWilson1]

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? 

[Amanda__Huber]

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. 

[CaseyWilson1]

@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.

[PlantPestSurveillancePROJECT]

We have the same problem as an EU institution. I have not found a workaround yet and would love to share thoughts about this with other users. 

[J_DavidMacLean]

Hi there: take care on moving PDFs to Google Cloud. I had many there and things worked fine for a while. Then Google blocked them with a "violation of Terms of Service" (or something similar) message. After that, I started using ArcGIS Online to host them. Worked great until I uploaded a PDF today, finding the same situation as others in this thread. (The nature of "my PDFs": mini-resumes of our GIS Industry-ready students; here's a working example https://bit.ly/COGS2022Grads. ) All the best, Dave

[ThomasBucher]

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.

[Amanda__Huber]

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. 

[ThomasBucher]

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

[RandallWilliams]

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. 

[J_DavidMacLean]

As like others in the replies, a fix for this would be greatly appreciated. The ability to have PDFs hosted and opened in the browser is very convenient.

We - at the Centre of Geographic Sciences - have a number of annual student mini-resume booklets hosted as PDFs via ArcGIS Online. Here's one uploaded years ago https://bit.ly/COGS2022Grads that opens in the browser; this one https://bit.ly/COGS2024Grads (updated today, 1 May 2024) gets DLed. Thanks for your detailed notes throughout this thread.

Thanks - Dave

[CaseyWilson1]

Thanks @RebeccaRichman for passing this along to the developers.