Start an automatic download?

DragonHighLord

I would like to track the number of times a file is downloaded. Currently I have a databse table with the id of the design to download and the filename. Sow hen you click the download link it's <a href=\"/designs/$file.zip\"> and it pulls the filename from the database depending on which id# design your looking at. All this works great (if you want to see what I mean: http://www.threadedtreasures.com under free designs). The way I have thought of tracking the number times the file is downloaded is to change the link to <a href=\"download.php?file=$file.zip\"> This would take me to the download.php page, increment the count in a database under the table with the filename and all would be ok. BUT, I would then have to put another link there to actually download the file unless there is some way to automatically start it. If anybody knows how or even a better way to do this, I owuld appreciate it (P.S.) I don't want to install a download manager module and the only link clicl trackers I could find, were too hard to implement seeing how my link has a variable,)
Thansk again everybody🆒

herve

Hi,

After processing your statistics, redirect the user :

header("Location: ...");

where '...' is the URL of the file to download
(or a PHP script with parameters)

Hervé.

DragonHighLord

Ok, I tried that and it says that header has already been sent

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/princess/public_html/header.php:4) in /home/princess/public_html/download.php on line 10

Is there some other redirect command?

I thought that would be it too....after ya mentioned it and I thought about it. o well

leonleun

all of the headers must be sent before you do any other output to the screen.

it sounds like somewhere you have output to the screen before calling header("Location: ...");

there are a couple ways to fix this.

1) make sure you call header(); before outputing anything
2) use output buffering

DragonHighLord

Yes, I have an actual header.php file that is loaded before the download page loads. It contains the the stating <html> stuff, draws the logo banner and menus, etc. So taking your advice on output first, I had it do the header () command before including the main and config files and drawing the header, and it works perfectly.

Thanks you guys so much for the help. Already since I was doing this, I got 5 downloads from the teddybear and 3 from the fish!!! Good thing I'm tracking them, now I know what people like.

Mark

i wish i wasnt stupid