How do I force an open/save dialogue on a download?

@nattrillMay 21.2006

Hi,

Basically i’ve got a pdf file that I want people to access as a download. When you click on it, it will automatically open the file for you. But I want it to display the open/save dialogue that you get when downloading a zip or unknown file type.

It is for a website that I am making for my church, so I want to make it as easy to use as possible. So I don’t to put the file in a zip, or expect people to know how to right click and select ‘save target as’.

Is there an easy way of doing this? Perhaps something to do with target= something?

Thanks for any help you can give!

Neil.

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@GarySMay 21.2006 — #Can be done with (for example) PHP by sending header information. Not sure it can be done with pure HTML, though.

@ray326May 22.2006 — #The easy way is to zip it up. Nothing can be done in HTML to force and even sending headers may not work in IE.

@slaughtersMay 22.2006 — #I did some quick Googling and there appears to be 2 different ways to do this. (I have not tried either). One is a JavaScript approach which looks to be IE specific

[CODE]<html>
 <body>
 <script>
 function downloadme(x){
 myTempWindow = window.open(x,’’,’left=10000,screenX=10000’);
 myTempWindow.document.execCommand(’SaveAs’,’null’,x);
 myTempWindow.close();
 }
 </script>
 
 <a href=javascript:downloadme("whatever.pdf");>Download this pdf</a>
 </body>
 </html>[/CODE]

For the other you can force the browser to display a "Save As/Open from current location" dialogue box when it wants to write known binary content to the client.

The official approach for this is to use a http header to request the display of user permission dialog box. This header is known as "Content-Disposition."

Following is the sample for server-side based applications, (almost all http libraries provide an API to set an http header).

HttpResponse.setHeader("Content-Disposition "," attachment; filename= whatever.pdf");

I beleive you can even force Content-Disposition to fit in a meta tag if you don't have the ability to issue server side commands. Something like:<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Disposition" CONTENT="attachment; filename=whatever.pdf">

@Robert_WellockMay 22.2006 — #Apache .htaccess: ForceType application/octet-stream pdf

@nattrillauthorMay 24.2006 — #Thankyou, i'll try it soon.

@ray326May 25.2006 — #Even with an application/octet-stream header IE may decide to "sniff" the response content and act according to the user's PDF binding.

How do I force an open/save dialogue on a download?

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