Difficulties Opening PDFs Attached to Work Items

Products

• Rally On-Premise
• Rally SaaS

Issue/Introduction

From time to time, there may be difficulties opening PDFs that are attached to work items.  In general, these issues are not related directly to Rally and ultimately it may be necessary to seek support from a third party vendor such as Microsoft or Adobe.

Environment

Release:
Component: ACSAAS

Resolution

Rally recommends the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or higher for viewing PDFs created by the application such as on the Reports screen, however your place of business may require a higher version of Adobe Reader to support the features in the PDFs created by your workplace.

Chrome Browser

Chrome ships with its own built in PDF viewer which works well for basic PDF files, but may fail while opening PDF files that contain embedded media such as Flash media.

When clicking a PDF in Agile Central, Chrome will first download the PDF to your computer and show it at the bottom of the browser window.
Right clicking on the PDF at the bottom of the browser will bring up a menu that will show the default behavior as well as give you a couple of options for how you may way want to open the PDF at that moment.

Always open in Adobe Reader

This option controls the default behavior of future actions with the downloaded file. 
Left clicking the downloaded PDF will open it in Adobe Reader as will right clicking and choosing Open.
When this option is set, "Open with system viewer" is not shown.

Open

 

The behavior of the Open option is controlled by the "Always open in Adobe Reader" option.  If it is not set, then the Chrome browser becomes the default viewer for PDFs downloaded.

Open with system viewer

This option is available when "Always open in Adobe Reader" is not selected.
This is a good option to use if you only have occasional issues opening PDF file within Chrome, since it will open it in Adobe Reader only for that file.

Firefox Browser

Firefox does not feature an internal PDF viewer and will rely on the installation of a supported version of Adobe Reader.  By default Firefox will present a dialog window asking what your preferred action is for the downloaded PDF.

Open with

This option will open the file directly in Adobe Reader.

Save File

 

This option will give you the ability to save the file to reference at a later time.  You can view your configured download folder to open the file.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer does not feature an internal PDF viewer and will rely on the installation of a supported version of Adobe Reader.  By default Internet Explorer will present a dialog window asking what your preferred action is for the downloaded PDF.

Open

The Open option will launch the PDF in the default PDF viewer configured for the operating system.

Save

The Save option will save the PDF to your configured download folder so that you may view it at a later time using your preferred PDF viewer.