[ILUG] Using PHP to output HTML and download a fie

[Francis Daly]

On 12/02/2012, Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie> wrote:

Hi there,

> when
> the user clicks the submit button, having entered the necessary data, I want
> him to get a confirmation page AND have the PDF downloaded in one action.

I'd suggest not doing that.

Keep it as one request -> one response, and you'll probably find
things much easier.

If that is an acceptable solution, then you'll have request#2 which
results in the PDF being returned, and request#1 which results in the
html confirmation page which includes a normal link to request#2, and
which also induces the browser to make request#2 itself, via a html
meta http-equiv tag, or via a javascript handler, or by some other
means.

Look at what happens when you try to download something from
sourceforge, for an example of how it can work.

> This question is probably more proper to a PHP list, but I'm not on any of
> those, and the platform in use is Linux, so . . .

"sourceforge" is a repository of some software that can run on Linux,
which preserves the tenuous link to being on-topic.

If you really want to do a multipart response, then the first question
is "do my target browsers support this adequately"; then comes "how do
I do the http-and-wrapping parts correctly in php"; and after that
"how to I fit the intended output into that wrapping".

I don't know the answers to any of those, which I why I suggest
avoiding the questions and causing two requests to be made (although
one should be automagically done by the browser).

Good luck with it,

  f