Question

PHP Content-type and Content-Disposition don't work on Internet Explorer

Asked by: dmehran

Hi, I am having great difficulty creating a PHP  code that downloads a PDF file for the user. I am very  frustrated with IE. My code works on  firefox, but on IE (7 and 8) it fails. My MIME  settings don't seem to work at all for IE. When accessing the page on IE, user receives the following popup::

"Internet Explorer cannot download getPDF.php from www.somewhere.com. Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is  either unavailable..."

In the message 'getPDF.php. is of course the page with the script and not the file name that is meant to be  downloaded. Please look at my code. I modified it a bit after coming across a discussion on a forum. It still doesn't work.

Thanks

if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"MSIE")){
 
	//header("X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff");
	// header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
	header("Content-type: application-download");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='my_pdf.pdf'");
	header("Pragma: no-cache");
	header("Expires: 0");
	// header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
}else{
 
       // header("Content-type: application-download");
	header('Content-type: application/pdf');
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='my_pdf.pdf'");
			
	header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
	header("Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
}
 
        readfile($url);

                                  
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Asked On
2009-10-11 at 20:33:58ID24803568
Tags

PHP IE internet explorer MIME

Topics

PHP for Windows

,

PHP and Databases

,

Internet Explorer Web Browser

Participating Experts
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Points
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: gr8gonzoPosted on 2009-10-11 at 21:42:35ID: 25548671

Try doing away with the if(IE) { ... } else { .... } logic, and just try this:

$filename = "my_pdf.pdf";
$url = "/path/to/real_file.pdf";
 
header('Pragma: public'); 
header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s') . ' GMT'); 
header('Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate'); // HTTP/1.1 
header('Cache-Control: pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0'); // HTTP/1.1 
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: none");
header("Content-Type: application/octetstream; name=\"" . $filename . "\""); //This should work for IE & Opera 
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=\"" . $filename . "\""); //This should work for the rest  
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . $filename . "\"");
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="' . $filename . '"'); 
header("Content-length: " . filesize($url)); 
readfile($url);

                                              
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by: gr8gonzoPosted on 2009-10-11 at 21:45:57ID: 25548678

By the way, I wouldn't suggest trying to stream a remote file straight to the client via your server. It'd be far better to actually download the file first into a cache directory, and then do a readfile() on the cached file. (Just in case $url is actually a full http://www.domain.com/etc/my_pdf.pdf  URL.)

 

by: dmehranPosted on 2009-10-12 at 18:10:08ID: 31640342

Thanks for the solution. It worked. Now, on writing the output to a cached directory before outputting, are you referring to use the ob_start('callback') and on_end_flush() methods?

Thanks

 

by: gr8gonzoPosted on 2009-10-12 at 21:35:11ID: 25556987

Not really. Basically, there are some PHP commands, like readfile(), that can read in data from a variety of sources. For example, if you give it a path to a file like /tmp/myfile.txt, it will read the file off of the hard drive. If you give a URL instead, like http://www.domain.com/myfile.txt, it'll try to download the file right then and there.

While PHP continues to get more reliable with each new version, it's still my experience that trying to download anything from a URL is still not 100% reliable. Even with broadband connections nowadays, you still occasionally hit that one page that just seems to hang until you refresh and then it pops right up. The same type of underlying problem exists when PHP tries to read / download a file from a URL. There are times when it can hang, and readfile() doesn't really give you much flexibility to recognize network timeouts or other problems.

(Plus, bandwidth is usually not something you want to use up lighttly.)

So my suggestion was basically to download the file onto the server's hard drive somewhere (create a directory for it), and then use readfile() to read the file from the hard disk. If the same file is requested more than once, then you've already saved bandwidth by not downloading that file again, and you're also serving it to the visitor much faster (it's far faster to read a file from a hard drive than to download it again each time it's requested).

Now, the code to download the file may still experience network hangups and stuff like that, but you can probably find some scripts out there that will help you by detecting hangups and automatically trying again if it fails the first time.

It's simply (and usually) better program structure.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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