CFContent does not work with IE on a SSL site. I have been looking for a fix but have not found one. As an alternative I was to have the CFContent download the excel sheet to a directory and then use cflocation to forward to that file. I really have no use for all of these files on my hard drive though.
I even tried using CFHeader
<CFHEADER NAME="Content-Disposition" VALUE="inline; filename=emp.xls">
<CFCONTENT TYPE="application/vnd.ms-excel">
Any ideas?
Typically issues like this with Internet Explorer and SSL have to do with caching.
Make sure that Internet Explorer does not have the setting Do not save encrypted pages to disk enabled (checked). You can find that setting in IE under Internet Options > Advanced > under the Security section.
Make sure that you are not sending no-cache headers with the response. Like these for example:
<cfheader name="PRAGMA" value="NO-CACHE" />
<cfheader name="CACHE-CONTROL" value="NO-CACHE" />
Note that some hardware/web servers can also send these no-cache headers if configured to do so. You can use a network monitoring tool like Fiddler to "see" these headers.