Re: Return PDF in Rest Service

Hi Toni,

The content type "application/pdf" doesn't make sense, as you're not returning a PDF.  (Not directly, that is.)  You're returning a JSON document.  One of several fields in the JSON document is meant to contain the PDF (that's what you told us) but it is still a JSON document, and therefore the proper content type would be "application/json"

The type of "application/pdf" would be used if you were sending the PDF directly without putting it inside a JSON document.

This, as well as the mention of content-disposition, makes me wonder if perhaps you didn't mean to put the PDF inside JSON? Maybe you really wanted to return the PDF directly?  That would certainly be a lot more commonplace of a task.

You mention that the PDF looks like "garbage", but it seems like that would be expected in this case?  After all a PDF document is a binary document, it is not made up of human-readable text (at least, not always).  So you should expect binary data.  Typically when putting binary data inside a JSON (or similar) document, you'd want to base64 encode it (like Brad said) but, that's only going to be useful if the receiving side expects it in that format.

Personally, that's where I would start...  get a clear picture of what you're expected to send.  Reading this thread, I'm not at all sure.