Hey Everyone,
This is something I discovered working through an issue. Thought I would pass it along since it does crop up on the message board.
If you store PDF documents on Amazon S3 and you want to download them to an iPhone to view it doesn't seem to work properly in the mobile browser. What happens is when you setup the download parameters you can specify that the PDF appear in an iFrame (check out the video "Amazon S3" in the library https://www.alphasoftware.com/videos). But the problem is the iFrame renders the PDF as an image and only shows the first page. So its completely useless if you want to show an entire PDF document.
So here is the "trick". Once the pdf "image" renders in the iFrame, on your iPhone use 3d touch (i.e. hold your finder down extra hard) on the iFrame and it will bring up the image and then keep holding and then it goes back
to S3 directly and renders the PDF directly.
At first I thought this was a major security breach because it shows you the URL to the PDF file with your access information (not the secret key though). But it would appear behind the scenes Alpha is generating a time limited URL to the file. After about 10 minutes the link expires.
So that is a tip to pass along, but it would be easiest if Alpha just gave us the link they create so users can just click it.
Has anyone else seen this behavior before? Is it a security problem?
Cheers,
Scott
This is something I discovered working through an issue. Thought I would pass it along since it does crop up on the message board.
If you store PDF documents on Amazon S3 and you want to download them to an iPhone to view it doesn't seem to work properly in the mobile browser. What happens is when you setup the download parameters you can specify that the PDF appear in an iFrame (check out the video "Amazon S3" in the library https://www.alphasoftware.com/videos). But the problem is the iFrame renders the PDF as an image and only shows the first page. So its completely useless if you want to show an entire PDF document.
So here is the "trick". Once the pdf "image" renders in the iFrame, on your iPhone use 3d touch (i.e. hold your finder down extra hard) on the iFrame and it will bring up the image and then keep holding and then it goes back
to S3 directly and renders the PDF directly.
At first I thought this was a major security breach because it shows you the URL to the PDF file with your access information (not the secret key though). But it would appear behind the scenes Alpha is generating a time limited URL to the file. After about 10 minutes the link expires.
So that is a tip to pass along, but it would be easiest if Alpha just gave us the link they create so users can just click it.
Has anyone else seen this behavior before? Is it a security problem?
Cheers,
Scott