Question

Possible Duplicate:
Header Location + Content Disposition

I have a page that generates excel report using header content-type and save the generation information on the database (e.g. who generated the report,when etc.) My problem is why I can’t redirect the page. below is the sample code/algo

// excel content
/* excel content populates here */

// output to excel file
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$positionFileName);
header("Cache-Control: max-age=0");

// save logs on the database  
/* save logs code executed here */

// redirect page to get the logs on the database that display on the web page
header("location: report.php");  *<--- I can't redirect to report.php*

Here is exactly what I want

the user will do is to select type of report then click button generate to output the excel report (open/save dialog). then after that, the system will going to save the logs of generated report on the database then show it on the page. that’s why I want to redirect it again on report.php so that the logs will be get again on the database to display on browser.

Answer 1

The headers are colliding. First you say “here comes a document”, using Content-Disposition: attachment, and then you say “Oh no, it’s not coming, do an additional request to XYZ”, using the Location header. You can omit the Content- headers to achieve the same result.

This however works for me:

header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foo.dat");
header("location: foo.dat");

In that I get redirected to the foo.dat file, which is displayed in the browser (so the Content-headers are ignored, since after the Location-header a new request is issued which does not get the Content-headers in its response. If you want to enforce attachment, either configure your web server to emit those headers for certain extensions or directories, or use fpassthru($filename) without the Location-header to directly emit the file without running into memory errors:

header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$positionFileName);
header("Cache-Control: max-age=0");

// save logs on the database  
/* save logs code executed here */

fpasstrhu($positionFileName);

But please note that any output generated during the executing of the code after the first three header()statements will be outputted to the browser, which’ll think it is file data.

I guess this is currently also happening, causing the header("location: ...") to fail. Enable error reporting to see why and where there was data printed.