Serving up files

[fermat1313]

I am working on a Document management system. Documents are stored on the local network filesystem, and indexed using my software, which stores document information in a database. Currently, when the user views a document, a new window is popped up, and the window is redirected using header() to the UNC path of the document on the network.

For security reasons, I don't want to do this. I want to configure security so that only my application has read access to these files, so I can ensure that only authorized users can read the documents. My goal is to have PHP read the file from the network and then display the document.

Below is a snippet of code to do this:

$doc_path_name = $doc_info['doc_data_path'] . $file_name;
insert_doc_access($doc_id, $_SESSION['user']['user_id'], VIEW_DOCUMENT);

header("Content-Type: " . $format['doc_format_mime_type'] . "\n");
header("Content-Length: " . $doc_info['doc_file_size']);
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=" . $file_name);
readfile($doc_path_name);

$format['doc_format_mime_type'] contains the MIME type for the document. In the case of a PDF document, for instance, it is application/pdf.

I have tried various combinations of headers, including and excluding the filename in the content-disposition header, exclusing content-disposition, excluding content-length, but the documents are not displayed correctly.

In Mozilla, I am prompted to open the document, but the document that it opens in Acrobat or Word is gibberish. I want the document to be viewed inline in the browser window.

In IE, I am prompted to open or save the file, and the file name is the URL that was sent to IE (http://doctracker/lookup/doc_view.php?doc_id=76&version=3) and then I get an error that IE was unable to open the site.

I am told that IE has problems where it ignores the Content-type header that is sent, but I'm having problems finding information about this.

Has anyone done something similar to this? Any help would be appreciated!

Steve

[AstroTeg]

Check out [man]header[/man]. I'm taking a guess your headers need a little tweaking (you appear to have the right headers, but the parameters might need some adjusting). There's some code snippets on php.net. You might cheat and copy some of them over to see if you can get those to work.

Example: you may find this header handy:

header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

and in there is an IE check like this:

if ((is_integer (strpos($user_agent, "msie"))) && (is_integer (strpos($user_agent, "win")))) {
   header( "Content-Disposition: filename=".basename($filename).";" );
} else {
   header( "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".basename($filename).";" );