Question

Not sure if the title makes sense sorry… basically I’m generating Word documents that I wanted to open automatically on the client’s machine, but it seems this isn’t possible, so instead of just presenting a list and having them manually click on each one, I was wondering if at the very least it could bring up the ‘Would you like to save or open this file’ dialogue 🙁

Long shot, but I know a lot of sites will do this when you download stuff… re-directing to download server etc

Thanks

Answer 1

The best you can do is provide a “hint” with the Content-disposition header.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

Specifying something like

<?php
header('Content-type: application/msword');

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');

// output content of document
?>

should cause most browsers to prompt the user to download the document, while this:

header('Content-Dispotion: inline')

should usually cause the browser to show the file in the existing window.