[LON-CAPA-users] Lon-Capa, PDFs and iOS

[Stuart Raeburn]

Hi,

> Of course, PDF files can easily contain viruses, since anything can   
> be embedded in them. Just saying ...

The change to suppress display of a warning about a file potentially  
containing viruses (for the specific case of a link to a PDF in a  
composite page) is done for consistency with LON-CAPA's handling of  
PDF files in other contexts (where no warning is displayed either).

For example, when a PDF file is uploaded or imported into a folder in  
a course, the URL of the PDF is modified by prepending /adm/wrapper,  
which causes lonwrapper.pm to be called when a user wishes to display  
the resource, and the PDF's URL in then the src attribute for an  
iframe tag within the web page.

How the user's browser handles display of the iframe's contents is  
determined by browser settings for the PDF content type -- one  
possibility is to prompt the user to save the file locally; another is  
to preview within the browser.

That said, my preference would actually be to implement scanning of  
all file uploads for viruses, e.g., using ClamAV, at the time a file  
is uploaded to LON-CAPA (similar to Moodle 2.3 and later).

I have created an enhancement request -- see:
http://bugs.loncapa.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6702


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium


Quoting Gerd Kortemeyer <korte at lite.msu.edu>:

> Hi,
>
> On Mar 8, 2014, at 3:41 PM, Mills, Douglas G <dmills at illinois.edu> wrote:
>
>> Beautiful! Thank you!
>
> Of course, PDF files can easily contain viruses, since anything can   
> be embedded in them. Just saying ...
>
> - Gerd.
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