Question

How can I force the save file download dialog box when I click an <a> tag?. There is a PDF file available on a remote server and when a user clicks that link we want to download that PDF file to their local system.

Thanks

Answer 1

Normally when you link a file that file will always display inside of the browser because the browser loads it and automatically determines the content type based on the file extension. So when you click on a link like a jpg image pdf etc the browser knows it’s an image/file and will display that file. You can of course always use the browser short cut menu and use the Save Target As option to save the file to disk.

If you want to do this automatically when a link is clicked from the server side, you have to send the file back yourself rather and add a couple of custom headers to the output. The way to do this is to use Response.TransmitFile() to explicitly send the file from your ASP.NET application and then add the Content Type and Content-Disposition headers.

So You neded to use headers liek below:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="filename.pdf"');

Here is an exapmle might help you :

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2007/May/21/Downloading-a-File-with-a-Save-As-Dialog-in-ASPNET