Sounds like you have a pretty good handle on this problem. You will have to send the right Content-type header to get the browser to handle the download correctly. Then, STDOUT will send the data to the user.

Filename in HTTP header? has information about setting a default filename for downloads. merlyn has a link to one of his recent articles about this. Basically, you will set the action attribute of the form to yourscriptname.cgi/FileName

The '/FileName' part will be ignored by the script, but probably used by the browser when setting the default filename for the download.

Just as an example, I have a file 'junk.html' with 

<form action=test.cgi/JunkName><input type="submit" name="Test"></form
+>

[download]
The '/JunkName' is to make the browser default to JunkName in the file save window.

This submits to test.cgi, which looks like: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;

print CGI::header(-Content-type=>'text-plain');
print 'This is a file'

[download]
When you click the submit button, the file save dialog comes up with JunkName as the filename.

Note: this is not a good example of good CGI programming! Concept only, please. :-)

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl

In reply to Re: Downloading things from a database by Russ
in thread Downloading things from a database by Anonymous Monk

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