Alex Le’s Blog

One of my little ColdFusion projects is to allow users to download a dynamically generated word document, whose contents are fetched from the database. Luckily, to open a file in word is pretty simple: just rename it into .doc and Word will open it. Especially, for HTML content, I can just force the user to download the HTML page and have him/her save it with a .doc extension and be done with it.

In my case, I didn’t want to write the dynamic content to a file and force the download via the Header of “Content-Disposition: attachment”. What I did was capturing all output into a file, then craft the HTTP header using the cfhead tag to force the inline download. Let me show you real quick how to do this, it may save you some time messing around with ColdFusion.

===== The script =====





#content#


===== Explanation =====
Let’s go over the A, B, C, D in the above code snippet.

* **A**: Since we don’t want ColdFusion to randomly send the contents (and of course, the header too, which will mess up the force download) to the client’s browser, we explicitly tell ColdFusion to only flush out the content contained within the cfoutput tag.
* **B**: Here you can do all of your data access, such as running retrieval queries, etc. It’s the R in the CRUD, **C**reate, **R**etrieve, **U**pdate, **D**elete
* **C**: We capture all output produced by cfoutput into a variable, which allows us to do filtering or word replacment later on.
* **D**: Now we craft the header to force the download. We explicitly say that this is a word document, so if the user has Word installed, s/he will have the option to open the file with Word directly.Here is the heart of the solution. Since we don’t have a file to read the contents from but a whole bunch of HTML contained in a variable, we set the Content-Disposition to inline and specify the name of the file that the user is about to download. You can set the file to be .doc if you’d like the downloaded file to be associated with Word.We provide some description to the downloaded file.#content#And now we can just flush out the content to the browser. That wasn’t too bad, was it? When the user accesses the CFML script, s/he will be prompted to download the file to the local computer. Nice!

===== Further Readings =====
No good tutorials are without a reference section, so here is the list of interested articles that I find useful
* [[http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=ColdFusion_Documentation&file=00000232.htm|Macromedia manual on Cfheader]]
* [[http://us2.php.net/readfile|PHP manual on readfile()]] and [[http://us2.php.net/header|PHP manual on header()]] - The 2 articles are particularly helpful to see how the header can be sent to the browser. Eventhough we used ColdFusion in this short tutorial, the same technique can also be applied to PHP.
* [[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2183.txt| RFC2183]] - The EITF Request for Changes technical details on header messages. I did use this as the starting point. When in doubt, look for RFC documents as they are is always the definitive (and most correct) guide.