Question

I know this question would have been asked several time but still I am not getting any solution to this problem..

I want both browser IE8, Mozilla to force download XML file as an attachment. But Mozilla opens the XML file in the browser itself and IE8 also try to render XML file on screen but render it incorrectly.

Here is my code in spring 3 controller.

Pmd17Export export=exportService.getFlatFile(dbdto.getExportFileId());
IOUtils.copy(export.getFlatFile().getBinaryStream(), response.getOutputStream());
response.setContentType("application/octet-stream");      
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition",
                   "attachment;filename=" + export.getFlatFileName()); 
response.flushBuffer();

Note : In browser I am first doing js validation then Submitting the form using jquery

function validate() {
    //validate form
    if(noerror) {
        $("form").submit();
    }
}

Attaching request and response header what i can see in firebug

Response Headersview 
Date    Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:55:42 GMT
Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1
Transfer-Encoding   chunked

Request Headersview 
Accept  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Connection  keep-alive
Cookie  JSESSIONID=5ED81A79A2297AD044E6DBB2B90806E7
Host    localhost:8080
Referer http://localhost:8080/dbcomparision/app/exportdatabase.html
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Request Headers From Upload Stream
Content-Length  15
Content-Type    application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Please tell me how can I force both browser to download this file.

Answer 1

Don’t you need to set the headers before you send the data? I.E.

response.setContentType("application/octet-stream");      
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition",
                   "attachment;filename=" + export.getFlatFileName()); 
IOUtils.copy(export.getFlatFile().getBinaryStream(), response.getOutputStream());