PHP generate file for download then redirect

Question

I have a PHP app that creates a CSV file which is forced to download using headers. Here's the relevant part of the code:

header('Content-Type: application/csv'); 
header("Content-length: " . filesize($NewFile)); 
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $FileName . '"'); 
echo $content;
exit();

What I'd like to do is redirect users to a new page after the file is built and the download prompt is sent. Just adding header("Location: /newpage") to the end didn't work, expectedly, so I'm not sure how to rig this up.

Answer 1

The header you are sending are HTTP headers. The browser takes that as a page request and processes it as a page. And in your case, a page it needs to download.

So adding a redirect header to that confuses the whole process of downloading the file (since headers are collected, generated into one header and then sent to the browser, you can try this by setting multiple redirect headers IIRC)

Answer 2

I don't think this can be done - although I am not 100% sure.

The common thing (e.g. in popular download sites) is the reverse: first you go to the "after" page and then the download starts.

So redirect your users to the "final" page that (among other things) says:

Your download should start automatically. If not click [a href="create_csv.php"]here[/a].

As about initiating the download (e.g. automatically calling create_csv.php) you have many options:

• HTML: [meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://site/create_csv.php"]
• Javascript: location.href = 'http://site/create_csv.php';
• iframe: [iframe src="create_csv.php"][/iframe]