Force Downloads
 

i've made a page with a link to an mp3 file
now then somebody clicks on that........the mp3 is opened in that page and played....
what i want is when the link is clicked...the (save as...) window should open

howcan i do it without using long perl scripts?

sounds like a job for javascript. Not sure if it can but I'd look into tthat....

sounds like you need to tweak your apache settings to me... I'm pretty sure you can set it per file-type what the server should allow you to do with it...

i added this line in apache which didnt work
addtype application/x-blah .mp3

Here's the deal with this. A browser initiates a request for a file. Could be any old file, a .html, a .gif, an .mp3, whatever. The browser has a MIME type associated with the file extension that it serves to the browser in the header of the file.

If the browser is standards-compliant, it'll have a registered book of helper apps to handle various MIME types, and if it doesn't recognize a particular MIME type, it'll ask what to do--including offering to download the file.

If the browser is Internet Explorer, on the other hand, it pays NO attention to the MIME type that the server sends. Instead it looks at the file extension and decides what to do based on that. No amount of MIME type fudging will have any impact on how IE disposes of the file.

Try downloading the file in Netscape or Opera and see what happens.

I don't have a solution for you except to rename the file to something other than .mp3. Which sucks, I know.

damn.....IE sux
i hoped there would be a server-side way to do this :(

Hate to offer a hack, but what the hay...have you tried renaming the extention on the server? IE will see .mp3, check the MIME types, find the extention mapped to the app, and use the app to open the file. If the extention was .mpX, which IE didn't know how to use, it would offer the multiple choice, including save as.
Not a solution, but a workaround.

except that windows is retarded enough that it won't know what to DO with a ".mpX" once it's on some user's HDD. I'd just put instructions to "right-click save-as" the link, personally.

true, true, the system won't know what to do with the file once it's downloaded. Of course, you put instructions on the page, some users are too retarded to read them.

and they'll be intelligent enough to rename a file once it's downloaded?

I'm pretty sure you can give the file a mime type of attachment or something like that, and it sets it to automatically download. I'll do some research and see what I can find. Just wanted to give you a headsup.

Nevermind.. you make the Content-Type header a application/attachment or something like that.

Problem is, it requires a bit of Perl or something-else code so when a link is clicked on it generates a "new page" that is the file and sends it to your browser with that Content-Type (it may be Content-Disposition). Your browser prompts you with what you want to do with the file. I think this works regardless of browser.

Check out this page for an idea of what I'm talking about.. I realise it's from a mailing list of a guy asking for help, but you can read his code and get the idea.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/...yJun/0000.html

Nope. It's Content-Type, for sure. But you can set it to "Content-type: X-Shoveit/Up-Yourass" for all it matters to Internet Explorer. That's the very string that you're changing with by manually setting the MIME type in the server's types file. Changing it with Perl or some other server-side scripting mechanism changes nothing.

Every document downloaded has one of those, by the way. The page you're looking at right here had a header sent from tfproject.org to your browser that read "Content-type: text/html\n\n". That "profile" button to the lower left of these words was "Content-type: image/gif\n\n". The server knows what to say by consulting its MIME types file against the extension of the file being sent.

Probably the easiet method: archive the file (probably zip) and set the link to that file. I realize that this is double-compression, but it is the only way to kick IE into saving the file...

Hope this helps

ppl here not smart enuf to rename the file after i change the extension

i got a little PHP script that sets conteny-tpye to application/octet-stream
let see if that works
here's the link if ne1 else wants to see 'http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/4179/fid/51

did it atlast

this goes in html file
and this is the PHP file
not too neat but heck...its my 1st script :p

now...how can we do that same thing with a jpeg or gif rather than an mp3 file?

EDIT: can you explain what if (!readfile($fol."\\".$file)) does? Im trying to do the same thin with Cold Fusion and rather than an mp3...do it with a jpg. Thanks!

It reads the file in the directory $fol with filename $file and writes it to standard output, i.e. the client requesting the page. But it's PHP and I don't know anything about ColdFusion so I can't help you with that part. However if you were using PHP you'd do it exactly the same way with a JPEG, just with a different filename.

By the way, that script is a bit of a security risk; all you have to do is change the values of fol and file and you can download any file for which the httpd process has read permission. Also, having register_globals on (where PHP maps the values for fol and file to $fol and $file) is a security risk in general, though probably not with this script, because a user who knows the names of variables in your script can add keys and values to the HTTP request and change the initial values of those variables. Just letting you know.

thats is very valuable information. i didn't even think about that. thanks!

[CFMX] forcing file download
 

Hi, Christian Cantrell posted this on this blog. (http://www.markme.com/cantrell/archives/002658.cfm)
Very handy.

This could be from a query or pretty much any query type source...

<cffile action="readbinary" file="/home/cantrell/Pictures/Corrs2.jpg" variable="pic"/>

This 'could' be reduced...why not experiment?

<cfscript>
context = getPageContext();
context.setFlushOutput(false);
response = context.getResponse().getResponse();
out = response.getOutputStream();
response.setContentType("image/jpeg");
response.setContentLength(arrayLen(pic));
out.write(pic);
out.flush();
out.close();
</cfscript>

It just takes some minor changes to change the content disposition and have the file 'download' to the client.

br00n