TechNote (Archived)

Flash Player 8 issue with cfdocument and cfreport

Issue

Dynamically streamed content from ColdFusion MX 7 in the FlashPaper format using a POST method will prevent the content from loading in Flash Player 8 within Internet Explorer.

This includes any FlashPaper content generated on a page that is posted to using cfdocument orcfreport.

The following code illustrates this behavior:

 <cfif isDefined("btn")><cfhttp url="http://www.yahoo.com"><cfdocument  ><cfoutput>#cfhttp.filecontent#</cfoutput></cfdocument><cfelse><form method="post" action="formpost.cfm"><input type="submit" name="btn" value="load flash movie"></form></cfif>

Reason

This problem is due to an issue with Internet Explorer and how it streams the content to the Flash Player. Microsoft has been notified and acknowledged this issue with Internet Explorer.

Solution

Since there is no way to control the combination of Flash Player version and browser that the client may be using, it is recommended that customers modify their web applications with one of the following options:

Use GET instead of POST on the requesting form.
Rather than returning a SWF directly to the client, return an HTML page that embeds the SWF. In order to accomplish this you may need to temporarily write the SWF to disk and create a custom wrapper.