Question

I am allowing users to upload documents to the server. However, i don’t want them to obviously see where the files are being stored. What can i do that will allow them to still get the file but without seeing the file location.

Answer 1

You can use a PHP query to accomplish this, lets say you use the following URL:

http://mysite.com/files.php?file=xyz.pdf

In files.php you can check the get variable file and have a hard coded function that retrieves the file. You can do this many ways one by using headers to force a download or read the file into a var and print it’s contents to the page. For say like a pdf reading the file and printing it to the page is the same as linking it to the file.

warning though: like with using headers do not print anything to the page except the file. I also recommend declairing you headers still if you read the file and print it so that the end user will not get the gobbly goop that is the source of the file i.e. jpg or pdf.

Oh no, I forgot a header warning, I have been running into a header problem ever since Adobe made the ISO for PDF’s open source, depending on the application that produced the PDF and the browser from which the user is uploading the PDF from, the header will be anything from:

'application/pdf', 'application/x-download','application/octet-stream','application/octet','binary/octet-stream'

so be careful hard coding the upload section to a header type, I know this question is about downloads but i just thought i would throw that in there. Also using headers for downloads doesn’t matter I would simply use the standard application/pdf there.