Question

I have run into an issue in which IE does not open up the Save As/Open dialog box for an Excel document like Firefox does.

So I have created a servlet filter that is using ‘*.xls’ as the url pattern. The issue that I now face (since this is the first filter I have created) is how to get the name of the file that the user wants so that the dialog box gets populated correctly. Currently the filter is invoked when the user selects a link on a given page.

Here is what I came up with:

The above is what I have doFilter().

String fileName = 'fileName.xls';  HttpServletRequest httpRequest = (HttpServletRequest) pRequest; String requestURI = httpRequest.getRequestURI();  if(StringUtils.isNotBlank(requestURI)) {   String uri[] = StringUtils.split(requestURI, '/');   fileName = uri[uri.length - 1]; }  HttpServletResponse httpResponse = (HttpServletResponse) pResponse; httpResponse.setContentType('application/vnd.ms-excel'); httpResponse.setHeader('Content-disposition', 'attachment; filename=\'' + fileName +'\''); 

web.xml:

<filter>     <filter-name>ExcelFilter</filter-name>     <filter-class>vsg.rp.common.ExcelFilter</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping>     <filter-name>ExcelFilter</filter-name>     <url-pattern>*.xls</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> 

This all is working on my development box: Windows XP, JBoss, Eclipse, Oracle. But when it runs on the test server—Linux, Apache/JBoss, Oracle—it does not work. It appears that the filter is not even being called, no errors thrown, etc. Any idea as to why this would happen?

Answer 1

You want the content type set appropriately as well as the content disposition header, thus:

response.setContentType(‘application/vnd.ms-excel’);
response.setHeader(‘Content-Disposition’, ‘attachment; filename=\” + filename + ‘\”);