Question

I’m using VS2010, SQLExpress 2008 R2 & EntityFramework to build a document management program.

When submitting a form using HttpPostedFileBase, xls & doc formats are saved with “application/octet-stream” as it’s content type. My problem is that when I download the file, it is not recognized as a xls or doc file.

Answer 1

you have a few options:

1. Save the file format or extension in a database column as well (easiest).
2. Save your files to disk and keep the location(path) in the database (faster).
3. try a third party library that tries to read the binary file headers to determine its format (that almost never works).