Question

I have documents (images, Word documents, PDF’s, etc) stored in an SQL Server database table. On my form, I display the names of these documents and need for the user to be able to click a document title and have the contents retrieved from the database and then opened in the default viewer; Word for example for a Word document.

I’m not sure about the best way to approach this. I tried using an $.ajax call to a web service that queries the database and then write the bytes out to the current context but this doesn’t seem to work.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use this approach:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306654
• http://aspguy.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/download-a-file-into-client-with-aspnet-20/
• http://www.xefteri.com/articles/show.cfm?id=8

Change the Response.ContentType to the correct type of content being streamed, which you can do by examining the extension of the file.