Paul, all, Thanks for the suggestion, but all appears to be well in Seaside (coming back to it after a while, I'm all the more impressed - it's a wonderful framework!). Below is what I posted on the Pharo list. It *has* to be some kind of Heisenbug in the Pharo debugger, or a bad interaction between same and Seaside. When I first set out to load the files and create mime types to serve them dynamically (it's more than fast enough for what I need, takes no new configuration on target machines, does not bloat a file library (200MB of stuff!!!, but served in smallish pieces, hence dynamic mime is great for it). End of sales pitch :) The important thing is that it works!!! Making a long story short, when I first went to create the mime document, I set a breakpoint at the top of a method called from my callback. It has access to canvas and component, but inspecting component requestContext would give a not-found error. Let the code run past that, and all is well =:0 My code looks something like this: serveFileNamed:fileName for:component canvas:html component session requestContext respond:[ :response | response document:self fullTextAsString mimeType:'application/pdf' fileName:fileName; doNotCache ] which is called inside a callback for a "full text" anchor. I can freely debug inside of #fullTextAsString, which was what I really needed to do because the paths were tricky to get right. Success. Thanks again! Bill ================= Got it!! I am now serving pdfs from my local drive w/o a file library and w/o an external web server. All goes through finding the file, loading the bytes and wrapping it a mime document. Like I said, security paranoia or laziness - pick one, but it's what I wanted. There is *something* preventing me from being able to set a breakpoint and evaluating code that should result in a working request context. Setting breakpoints *after* the context is found does work. I was able to use the debugger to good effect in getting the mime document and file naming sorted out. -------------------------------- Paul DeBruicker pdebruic at gmail.com <mailto:seaside%40lists.squeakfoundation.org?Subject=%5BSeaside%5D%20WARequestContextNotFound%20-%20where%20to%20look%20for%20a%20context%3F&In-Reply-To=F675A34D5DDAA64297A2F6B9D5B6E9EF0A82C50D%40AHC-MB02.ad.ufl.edu> Fri Mar 16 16:26:22 UTC 2012 * Previous message: [Seaside] WARequestContextNotFound - where to look for a context? <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/028462.html> * Next message: [Seaside] Local Anchor <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/028471.html> * Messages sorted by: [ date ]<http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/date.html#284...> [ thread ]<http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/thread.html#2...> [ subject ]<http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/subject.html#...> [ author ]<http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/seaside/2012-March/author.html#2...> ________________________________ On 12-03-15 10:34 AM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:

. The archive in question is way too big for a FileLibrary and a separate web server is probably overkill since I intend to do all of this locally and would rather not have to run Apache on the machines in question (security paranoia or laziness,

You can serve static files from disk with Comanche if you want. See: http://samadhiweb.com/blog/2011.07.10.seaside.comanche.staticfiles.html for configuration ideas.