Hello,

I was wondering if anyone knew of the best way to output a refreshed page from a cgi program and then start a file download to the user's computer.

Basically, I have a Perl cgi program that creates new excel files on the fly, based on the information submitted in the form. The form contains a browser file upload field to let the user submit the data. What I want to do is first refresh the webpage to provide additional information to the user after they submit the form and then start the download.

I looked around, but the only two things I could find that were similar to what I am doing were:

1. When the user submits the form, insert form submit code into the form's onLoad() event, so that when the webpage refreshes it would submit itself again, this time indicating to the cgi program that it should start the required download.

Problems with this approach:

• browser file upload field resets after the form is submited the first time
• and if it doesn't reset, it would be uploading the same data twice to the server which is hardly efficient
• and if I don't submit the data twice, I'd have to deal with possible left-over temporary files and session management code in general

• the file to be downloaded is built on the fly or removed automatically by File::Temp when the cgi exits. Having to properly deal with long-lived temporary files in otherwise a very simple script sounds like a huge inconvenience.

# create excel file
my ($fh, $xls_filename) = tempfile(DIR => $tempfile_path, SUFFIX => ".
+xls", UNLINK => 1);

my $xls_workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new($xls_filename);
my $xls_worksheet = $xls_workbook->add_worksheet();

### inserting data into the worksheet

$xls_workbook->close();

my $download_filename = "standard_filename.xls";

print "Content-Title: $download_filename\n"; 
print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$download_filename\n"
+; 
print "Content-Type: application/octet-stream; file=$download_filename
+\n\n"; 

open(XLS, $xls_filename) or die "can't open temporary excel file: $!\n
+";
binmode XLS;             
binmode STDOUT; 

my $buff; 
while( read(XLS, $buff, 1024) ) { 
    print STDOUT $buff; 
} 
close(XLS);
exit(0); # exit for now - without refreshing the screen
[download]

Any insights, anyone?

Thanks!