Download and "thank you" page in one click

Question

I have a php-apache website on which I am trying to track download conversions using Google Analytics. I want my users to initiate the download and be redirected to a "thank you" page in one click. The way I'm envisioning this is:

The user clicks one of several download buttons which sends them to a generic thankyou.php page, and passes a variable telling that page which file to give them. Thankyou.php contains a header which uses that variable to start a download dialogue.

If there are better ways to do this, I am open to anything. To my bewilderment, I haven't found a good way to do this after several hours of poking around here and on Google.

Many thanks in advance :-)

Answer 1

Send the file after the ThankYou page has been loaded. You could either use an iframe for this (if this is allowed in your (X)HTML variant), e.g.

<iframe src="download.php?id=123" style="display:none;" />

or a meta refresh, e.g.

<META http-equiv="refresh" content="1;URL=download.php?id=123">

or use JavaScript or whatever is able to call a URL. You could then write something like your download should start automatically in a second. If not please click this link, where the link is href'ed to download.php?id=123 as well.

In download.php you'd just send the regular headers for sending a file and pass it to the client. Check this question's answers to see how.

Also see this related question.