Re: File Download Headers

On Thu, June 15, 2006 10:17 am, Jon Anderson wrote: > Richard Lynch wrote: >> Can any experts on this list explain to me why, despite the >> 1,000,000 >> places that application/octet-stream is documented to work, and has >> always worked, since Mosaic 1.0 days, people manage to find these >> goofball Content-type: headers that are supposed to work, but only >> work in a handful of browsers, and then they write tutorials as if >> it's the Right Way, and then those tutorials get past alleged >> Editors, >> and are all you can find from Google? >> >> Anybody? > Well, I can't vouch for any goofballs, their editors, nor google, but > unfortunately sometimes an alternative to application/octet-stream has > to be used to work around brokenness in certain versions of IE...We > used > octet-stream, and had a small portion of users complaining because > they > couldn't open the file that was downloaded - "I can't open > download.php", hence the workaround. But they downloaded it. They HAVE the data, it's just got a filename they don't know what to do with. If they just change the extension to whatever it should be, it would be fine. > - We can't use download.php?/filename.ext - (long story, but suffice > it > to say that it can't be done for non-technical reasons.) Well, then, you've just eliminated a correct technical solution for non-technical reasons... I cannot do much about that... Actually, if you REALLY want to be browser-compliant back to the stone age, and througout the dreaded 3.x and 4.x series, you would need to get the URL to be just: http://example.com/script_that_looks_like_dirname/filename.ext That odd-looking dirname is a PHP script. URL juggling with mod_rewrite ForceType and $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] is the tech. The browser then CANNOT screw up beause it "looks" like a static URL. > - IE doesn't take the Content-Disposition in some cases unless you use > a > different content-type. > > Our code basically does this: > > if (IE) { > use wrong content type; > if (IE 5.5) { > use broken content disposition; > } else { > use normal content disposition; > } > } else { > do things in a standard way; > } My code basically looks like this: header("Content-type: application/octet-stream"); Though, admittedly, the 3 lines in .htaccess should "count" And, if you want input parameters in the URL instead of GET (which will mess up FDF files) then there's another 20 lines to parse $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] into an array, just like $_GET and $_POST, only not. But then, that code is in an include file and gets re-used for a lot of different rich media (images, PDF, Ming flash movies, etc) so it's got a decent re-use factor. Maybe I'm just re-using code from 5 years ago that could be replaced by the browser-detecting (assuming the user-agent doesn't lie) and using some new-fangled headers... Or I could just keep using the code that cannot break. Yeah, I like that. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm