This is nothing new. In fact, in terms of code, it's downright old. The code's been available on the site ever since I wrote it, but it took some creative thinking to get it... until now.

I'm not sure how useful this will be for others, but here's the script we've been using to get the download box to pop up for our scripts. It seems to work for the most part. We've had problems with IE in the past displaying things that look like HTML documents within the first couple lines, but the ASP 101 Sample Code header we add seems to get around this.

So as not to let people run wild with this, we have two conditionals limiting it's use. The first looks for and aborts if it finds any / or \ characters in the input. This keeps things in the right directory. It can easily be removed, but it seemed like a good first step at stopping abuse.

The other was designed as a nice little filter so that you'd only see the important stuff when you got sample code. The script looks for two comments indicating when to start returning the code and when to stop. On top of keeping the code you download free of all our nav bars and ad code, it also works as another little security check. You see... if it never finds the start comment, it doesn't return anything. Hence, any file that you haven't explicitly added the comment to should be safe from prying eyes. This is also easy to remove if you'd like, but please be careful. It's rather trivial for someone to use code like this to be able to read almost any file on your server... even stuff outside of your web directories!

Related Links

• File Download List by Jason Withrow

There are a number of MS Knowledgebase articles relating to this topic. Here are some of the ones we've found useful in fixing IE's problems with the right way to do this. Come to think of it this would be downright easy if it weren't for all the bugs!

• HOWTO: Raise a "File Download" Dialog Box for a Known MIME Type
• FIX: Content-Disposition Attachment Header Does Not Save File
• FIX: Content-Disposition: Does not Force File Download Dialog
• FIX: "Content-Disposition: Attachment" Fails for Known Content Types
• FIX: Content-Disposition: Attachment Saves Wrong Filename for Unknown Extension
• Internet Explorer Saves HTML Content Instead of the Active Document
• Incorrect File Name in the File Open or File Save Dialog Boxes
• Unable to Open or View Downloaded File without File Extension