Question

I’m wondering if it’s possible to do this in Rails:

Have a link on the webpage. When the user clicks on the link, the controller generates a file dynamically (say, a text file that contains a single random number between 1 and 10), and the file is downloaded onto the user’s computer. The file might be temporarily stored on the server, but it shouldn’t be permanently there.

Answer 1

Use send_data in the controller:

send_data("4", :filename => "my_awesome_file")

If you already have the file on the server, you can use send_file instead

send_file(filepath, :filename => "my_awesome_file")

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/DataStreaming.html#method-i-send_data