Content Disposition in different browsers

Today I had to resolve an issue where in different browsers the filed dynamically generated download worked very differently / at all




The setup, we had an xml file with a custom extension, say .mj, which was being served up by ASP. The HTTP Header had a content disposition header and a response type set.



Response.AddHeader "Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=""our file.mj"""
Response.ContentType = "text/xml"

This worked fine in Internet Explorer, the file was downloaded as "our file.mj". However FireFox and Chrome acted very differently, in FireFox the file was downloaded as just "our", and Chrome as "our file.xml".


In FireFox it appears that the issue is caused by having a space in the file name, this forum post by funkdaddu helped me on this, so by removing the space FireFox could now download the file as "ourfile.mj".




Chrome however did not want to play ball. It was still insisting on changing the file extension to ".xml". I guessed it was because we were telling it we serving up text/xml mime/type under a different file extension, I decided to change the response type to "Application/Save" just to see if this would make a difference, and amazingly it did. Amazing!




So there we have it, changing the file name to have no spaces and ensuring that the content type is set to "Application/Save" seems to make all browsers behave at least some what consistently with the Content Disposition header. Its worth noting that Scott Hanselman has a great blog post The Content Disposition Saga which talks alot about how the different of IE handles it. Also GreenBytes has a ton Test Cases for HTTP Content-Disposition header which I certainly found helpful.

Comments

  1. Christian Kimbi2 May 2011 at 21:23

    Solved the firefox spaces problems Surround your filename with quotes.

    Change the code below
    response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=" + fileName);

    to
    response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=\"" + fileName+ "\"");

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WebUSB - An unexpected update...

Image
In January at my new(ish) user group Momentum Meetups , I presented on "Reaching out beyond the Chrome" (although suffering from food poisoning so I was definitely going green at points!). It included  WebUSB and WebBluetooth . I was excited by how powerful it was and even had a colleague present something we had been prototyping in out work place. During the talk I mentioned security and how it had been designed so it only works on https and there's a permission model where you have to approve the device before it can be used. Unfortunately this week it came to light that Authentication devices could be bypassed via USB. These devices are a great way of proving you are who you say you are on the web beyond basic 2FA text's or applications. So being able to be able to bypass them via WebUSB is a big deal :( My Original Security Slide A few days later Google then disabled WebUSB by default effectively killing it off until such a time where its made secure...
Read more

Can you use BuildRoot with Windows Subsystem for Linux......

Image
A quick note I started this blog post back in August of 2018 and never completed it. Essentially I wrote most of it and then found I just couldn't run BuildRoot properly, I came back to it every Windows 10 release due to performance improvements etc however its only now with WSL2 that this is possible. Read on to find out the full story :) Original Post I love Windows Subsystem for Linux , I mention it all the time in work, done "brown bag" sessions on it, even did a lightning talk on it at DDDSW 18 . This week I've been working with a contractor to produce essentially an Embedded OS for a project. Previously I've always used existing distributions and made them "lite" or used preconfigured ones, Raspbian Lite for example however he promptly told me I'm doing it wrong and that I shoudl be using BuildRoot. Buildroot is a simple, efficient and easy-to-use tool to generate embedded Linux systems through cross-compilation. Sound's interest...
Read more

DotNet CLI , private NuGet feeds and Linux...

Today I hit an issue whilst trying to run dotnet run for some of our benchmarkdotnet tests which I like to run all new hardware I try out. My pair of Raspberry PI 4's arrived and I wanted to compare the performance of our Fingerprint capture code. I've hit the issue before and last time I figured it out I swore I'd blog and write it up as I knew I would forget! My benchmark project is a straight forward BenchmarkDotNet project however it consumers NuGet packages from both nuget.org as well as our private NuGet repository which requires authentication. For all of our windows machines this works without an issue for machines on the domain they authenticate seemlessly however when using Linux devices this is a different issue :( Instead on Linux devices we always get: /home/pi/dotnet/sdk/2.2.300/NuGet.targets(121,5): error :   GSSAPI operation failed with error - An invalid status code was supplied (SPNEGO cannot find mechanisms to negotiate). This essentially means it ...
Read more