Return PDF documents - pdf

Question

I've tried implementing a custom formatter for returning PDF documents from ServiceStack. Without much luck, though. I've looked at the examples and pretty much copied the VCard sample, but replaced it with my code. My formatter looks something like this:
public class PdfFormatter
{
private const string PdfFormatContentType = "application/pdf";
public static void Register(IAppHost appHost)
{
appHost.ContentTypeFilters.Register(PdfFormatContentType, SerializeToStream, (t, s) => { throw new NotImplementedException(); });
}
public static void SerializeToStream(IRequestContext requestcontext, object dto, Stream outputstream)
{
...
}
}
I've called Register from my AppHost and the Content Type Filter is added as expected. My problem is that SerializeToStream is only called when accessing the metadata for my methods. When I call the concrete method on servicestack, an HTML response is returned.
The URL called is: http://mydomain.com/api/pdf/reply/GenerateDocument
The request headers looks like this:
Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8,da;q=0.6
Cache-Control:max-age=0
Connection:keep-alive
Host:mydomain.com
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31
The response headers look like this:
Cache-Control:private
Connection:Close
Content-Length:46
Content-Type:application/pdf; charset=utf-8
Date:Thu, 16 May 2013 19:59:27 GMT
Server:ASP.NET Development Server/11.0.0.0
X-AspNet-Version:4.0.30319
X-Powered-By:ServiceStack/3,945 Win32NT/.NET
The response is actually PDF but the debugger doesn't break in SerializeToStream.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

After registering the Content-Type, the client still needs to tell ServiceStack that it wants the PDF content type.
You can do this on the url:
http://example.org/myservice?format=pdf
via a pre-defined route:
http://example.org/pdf/reply/GenerateDocument
Or in the HTTP Accept header, e.g:
GET /myservice
Host: example.org
Accept: application/pdf