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Force to open "Save As..." popup open at text link click for pdf in HTML.

Answer 1

A:

If you have a plugin within browser which knows how to open a pdf file it will open directly. Like in case of images and html content. So the alternative approach is not to send your mime type in response in this way browser will never know which plugin should open it. Hence it will give you a Save Open dialog box.

sushil bharwani 2010-09-27 09:37:08

That's hard to achieve because it's the server that sends the mime type and when linking directly to a PDF file, you cannot change the headers.

dark_charlie 2010-09-27 09:48:04

Answer 2

+1 A:

Generally it happens, because some the browsers settings or plug-ins directly open pdf in a same window like an simple web-page. This might help you. I have done it in PHP few years back. But, currently I'm not working on that platform.

<?php if (isset($_GET['file'])) { $file = $_GET['file'] if (file_exists($file) && is_readable($file) && preg_match('/\.pdf$/',$file)) { header('Content-type: application/pdf'); header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file\""); readfile($file); } } else { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); echo "<h1>Error 404: File Not Found: <br /><em>$file</em></h1>"; } ?>

Save this little snippet as a PHP file somewhere on your server and you can use it to make a file download in the browser, rather than display directly. If you want to serve files other than PDF, remove or edit line 5.

You can use it like so;

Add the following link to your HTML file. <a href="download.php?file=my_pdf_file.pdf">Download the cool PDF.</a>

Save this little snippet as a PHP file somewhere on your server and you can use it to make a file download in the browser, rather than display directly. If you want to serve files other than PDF, remove or edit line 5.

You can use it like so;

Add the following link to your HTML file. Download PDF.

Reference from : This blog

Ashay 2010-09-27 09:42:14

Answer 3

+1 A:

Meta tags are not a reliable way to achieve this result. Generally you shouldn't even do this - it should be left up to the user/user agent what it does with the content you provide to it. The user can certainly make its browser to download the file if he or she wishes that.
If you still want to force the browser to download the file, modify the HTTP headers directly. Here's a PHP code example:

$path = "path/to/file.pdf";
$filename = "file.pdf";
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');  // For Gecko browsers mainly
header('Last-Modified: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', filemtime($path)) . ' GMT');
header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');  // For download resume
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));  // File size
header('Content-Encoding: none');
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');  // Change this mime type if the file is not PDF
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $filename);  // Make the browser display the Save As dialog

Note that this is just an extension to the HTTP protocol and some browsers might ignore it anyway.

dark_charlie 2010-09-27 09:45:30

In practice I believe this is widely implemented.

Matthew Wilson 2010-09-27 10:00:46

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Force to open "Save As..." popup open at text link click for pdf in HTML.

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