Comments on: Making IE Accept File Downloads

By: Glen H. Barratt

Glen H. Barratt — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:42:52 +0000

Thank you so much. Your fix was the only one that worked for me. The “if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)) session_cache_limiter(“public”);” that is.

By: Jody

Jody — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:35:09 +0000

Thanks Duncan, your method works for my site which uses SSL that annoys the crap out of me. For both IE and FF> :) Whee now I can work better!

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:22:45 +0000

I’m still having trouble after looking through and trying your suggestion and those in the comments. I’m running ASP.NET 2.0, IIS, Win2003.

I’m generating a CSV file for users to download when they click a button on a page (the page is SiteReports.aspx). Without SSL, it works great in FF and IE7. With SSL (which I need to do), it works great in FF, but in IE7:

-> If I have ContentType set to ‘application/octet-stream’, I get a file download prompt, but the filename I gave it is replaced with ‘SiteReports_aspx’, with no extension, so if they user chooses ‘open’ from the download prompt, it opens as plain text within IE.
-> If I have ContentType set to anything else, I get ‘Internet Explorer cannot download SiteReports.aspx from etc…’.

I don’t understand why it tries to download something with a different filename than the one I specified in Content-Disposition. I’m currently setting up my headers like this:

Response.Clear();
Response.Charset = String.Empty;
Response.ContentType = “application/octet-stream”;
Response.AddHeader(“Pragma”, “public”);
Response.AddHeader(“Cache-Control”, “max-age=10″);
Response.AddHeader(“Content-Disposition”, “attachment; filename=test.csv”);
Response.Write(fileContents);
Response.End();

Any ideas? Thanks.

By: stephan

stephan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:46:30 +0000

thanks for that. additionally the particular IE’s here are only happy if content-type header offers encoding=… as well.

e.g.
header(‘Content-type: application/octet-stream; encoding=UTF-8′);

By: sandy

sandy — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:13:28 +0000

I am running into similar problem and tried all the combination given in this post but alas!
I have asp page over SSL and trying to generate the CSV file but not working. Any help?
esponse.Clear
Response.AddHeader “Pragma: public”
Response.AddHeader “Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, no-transform, must-revalidate, private”;
Response.AddHeader “Title”, “My Report Results”
Response.ContentType = “text/csv”
Response.AddHeader “Content-disposition”, “Attachment;filename=Myreport.csv”

By: pkachhia

pkachhia — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:09:24 +0000

Hi,
I have the problem which is something related to this post.
I have trying to download the file using the download code.
It’s work fine in IE7, Mozilla, chrome but it is not works in IE6.
The most socking thing is , few days ago , it is working in all the browsers, even in IE6. But today i got this error.When I have trying to use IE6 for download it shows the following message:
“Internet explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.”
Can any body help me?

Regards,
Pkachhia

By: Meesh

Meesh — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:10:46 +0000

Thank you thank you thank you!!!! This saved me a massive headache.. well, I had one starting until I found your helpful article.. your solution worked.
Gracias merci and danke schoen!!!

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 09:30:52 +0000

Hi,
I am facing problem while opening a text file using IE6. It gives an error message like �C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\\file[1].csv could not be found.

After doing google I came to know that it is a know issue with IE6 (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/5891.htm ) But mentioned fix did not work in my case. This is how I am setting http header:

header(“Cache-Control: “);
header(“Pragma: “);
header(‘Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
header(‘Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘ . $file . ‘.txt”‘); //default extension to .txt for easier open)

But problem still persist. One workaround is to replace a .txt format to .doc / .rtf, In that case I am able to open file using MS word, but issue will be when someone trying to open a file where don�t have MS word.

Please Help. I also tried with all the combination for header Pragma and Cache-Control mentioned on this page.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:21:12 +0000

You star! That one completely stumped me… You’re a bloody legend.

By: jan

jan — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:11:43 +0000

Thanks alot … been looking for this for ages!!

Kind regards,