javascript compatibility question

I've been trying to track down a strange bug in one of my web applications. Here is the sequence of events:

1. user clicks on a link in the webpage which fires javascript that uses a window.showModalDialog to open a URL
2. this url is an asp.net page that uses a binary write to display a PDF

When I run this in Firefox it works fine. When I run it in IE nothing displays on the page and it never errors out.

If I go directly to the url of the asp.net page in either FF or IE it works fine. Are there any window.showModalDialog issues that could 开发者_JAVA技巧be causing this?

Code from the aspx page page load:

    Dim req As WebRequest = WebRequest.Create("...")
    Dim resp As WebResponse = req.GetResponse()
    Dim rdr As BinaryReader = New BinaryReader(resp.GetResponseStream())
    Dim pdfByte() As Byte = rdr.ReadBytes(Convert.ToInt32(resp.ContentLength))
    Response.Clear()
    Response.ContentType = "application/pdf"
    Response.BinaryWrite(pdfByte)
    Response.Flush()
    Response.End()

Javascript:

window.showModalDialog(sUrl,'',sFeatures)

The javascript i posted is where the problem occurs out. Let me know if you need more.

I remember that in IE the name of the page could cause problems, I wrote about this years ago there http://amrelgarhytech.blogspot.com/2008/06/windowopen-invalid-argument.html

But I am not sure if this is your problem

I seems there is an issue with IE, modal dialog and PDFs:

http://technicalsol.blogspot.com/2008/06/pdf-in-modal-dialog-box.html

The work around appears to be embed the PDF in an iFrame.

I ended up changing my window.showModalDialog to a window.open. I found a few others that had this problem but no real solution to get it working with showModalDialog.