Question

Hyperlinks in Email

Asked by: zkeown

I am generating an internal email in C# that contains a hyperlink to a file on a server.  Depending on the recipients email
client and personal settings, when they click on the link, some are prompted to save and for others it immediately opens the file.
Is there something I can do to always allow some sort of prompt to save the file?

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Asked On
2009-10-30 at 05:35:52ID24857843
Tags

Hyperlinks

,

Prompt

,

C#

,

file

Topic

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: mpn_1983Posted on 2009-10-30 at 06:29:00ID: 25702704

Yes, there should be I vaguely recall having a similar problem myself some time ago.

I think it hinged on doing something with 'content-disposition'?

The link could go to a page designed to handle the download for which one of it's functions would be to always prompt a user what to do with the file - though thats extra work it may be the only way to 'force' the issue as otherwise the decision is presumably handled by the server and if unspecified the client?

hth
Matt

 

by: zkeownPosted on 2009-10-30 at 08:24:32ID: 25703884

I think you are probably going to be correct, I am going to give that a try next week.  If you happen to know of any sites I could reference that does something similar, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

 

by: mpn_1983Posted on 2009-10-30 at 09:30:30ID: 25704585

Here's a really brief article on the concept by a pretty well known developer:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheContentDispositionSagaControllingTheSuggestedFileNameInTheBrowsersSaveAsDialog.aspx

There's also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260519

For code examples:

Here's a c# example:

Here is a code snippet in asp.net(C#):

private void Button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
        string strFileToDownload=@"C:\1.jpg";
        Response.ContentType = "application/octet-stream";
        Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;
filename="+System.IO.Path .GetFileName(strFileToDownload));

        Response.WriteFile(strFileToDownload);

}

found on: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/community/aspnet/17/76432/use-the-contentdispositi.aspx (this page point back to the ms article i've linked to too)

A bit more here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/336345/c-asp-net-3-5-content-disposition-file-download-problems

Then I found something I didn't know, it seems there is a content disposition class in .net:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.mime.contentdisposition.aspx

hth and that I'm not just drowning you in links
Matt

p.s. Strangely this afternoon I've had a something dropped on my desk essentially asking to create such a download page in PHP so i'll be going over this stuff myself in the near future - let me know how it works out for you. I'll try and post back my PHP code when i'm done (or I might convert it to c# just to keep in practice - not using to much .net these days)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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