Anyway to bring up the 'Open / Save' dialogue for the user? - php

Question

Not sure if the title makes sense sorry... basically I'm generating Word documents that I wanted to open automatically on the client's machine, but it seems this isn't possible, so instead of just presenting a list and having them manually click on each one, I was wondering if at the very least it could bring up the 'Would you like to save or open this file' dialogue :(
Long shot, but I know a lot of sites will do this when you download stuff... re-directing to download server etc
Thanks

Answer 1

The best you can do is provide a "hint" with the Content-disposition header.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php
Specifying something like
<?php
header('Content-type: application/msword');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');
// output content of document
?>
should cause most browsers to prompt the user to download the document, while this:
header('Content-Dispotion: inline')
should usually cause the browser to show the file in the existing window.

Answer 2

You can set the contenttype and content-disposition header to open the open/save dialog box in browser.
See
Header Field Definition
for details.

Answer 3

You need to send the correct header and so on.
I found this that seems good:
<?php
function send_file($name) {
ob_end_clean();
$path = "protected/".$name;
if (!is_file($path) or connection_status()!=0) return(FALSE);
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", mktime(date("H")+2, date("i"), date("s"), date("m"), date("d"), date("Y")))." GMT");
header("Last-Modified: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s")." GMT");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Length: ".(string)(filesize($path)));
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=$name");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary\n");
if ($file = fopen($path, 'rb')) {
while(!feof($file) and (connection_status()==0)) {
print(fread($file, 1024*8));
flush();
}
fclose($file);
}
return((connection_status()==0) and !connection_aborted());
}
?>
And here's an example of using the function:
<?php
if (!send_file("platinumdemo.zip")) {
die ("file transfer failed");
// either the file transfer was incomplete
// or the file was not found
} else {
// the download was a success
// log, or do whatever else
}
?>