I had a client report this strange issue with Excel file handling in IE7 and IE8 (and Office 2007). Basically, every time someone would open a document, it would get cached by IE. But the next time the person would try to open the same document, they’d get a “file is locked by user” message. It seemed IE was caching the file in the Temporary Files folder, then when the user would click the link a second time there was a conflict between the existing file in that folder and the new one IE was trying to bring in. I found some articles and discussions on the topic, but most came back to making changes on the client-side, which is never easy to do in an enterprise. Even if it’s a little trickier to execute, you should always try to make changes on the WebCenter Portal side.
In this case, after downloading the Excel file the first time, I confirmed it was in my Temporary Internet Files folder:
I was also able to verify that the portal was returning a “Not-Modified” header when the user tried to open this Excel document again:
The fix I applied here? Another BigIP iRule that turns off caching of Excel files – after the jump. (more…)
