Download file when user clicks dialog button

Question

I have a dialog box open when a user clicks on a url. In that dialog box, I have two buttons, "OK" (which closes the dialog box) and "download file" (which, I would like to have the file I just created via PHP be downloaded when clicked). How can I achieve that functionality with the "download file" button?

I tried $.get but that only retrieves the data of the file and doesn't prompt the user to download the file.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Inside the click handler for that button:

window.location.href = "path/to/file/on/server.txt";

By the way, you don't actually have to write out a file in this case. You can use URL rewriting to make this a "virtual file", which runs your PHP code to emit the file data when accessed. You change the PHP to return the generated file data directly instead of writing it to a file.

EDIT: Virtual files in Apache:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /vfiles
    RewriteRule ~vfiles/([a-z]+)\.txt vfile-handler.php?id=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

This says that http://my.server/vfiles/foo.txt gets transparently redirected inside the Apache server to run vfile-handler.php instead, passing it "id=foo" as the query string, which you deal with just like any other GET request with a query string. Your PHP script then sets the MIME type appropriately (text/plain in this case, since we're claiming to be a .txt file) and builds the reply just as if we were building an HTML page on the fly.