Dynamic creation of CSV files

edwardfingleton

I am attempting to dynamically create a CSV file from information in a database and then offer it for download to a user.

I know how to create a file with the relevant information inside on loading a page, and subsequently how to offer the link to download it.
However, once the file is downloaded and the user navigates away from the page; the file is left on my server; this potentially has both security and disk-space issues.

Does anyone know if I can create and offer the file for download without physically saving it on my server, or if I can work some way of the file being deleted as soon as the download has finished?

Thanks in advance,

Edward Fingleton

samudasu

http://de.php.net/manual/en/function.tempnam.php

edwardfingleton

edwardfingleton wrote:
or if I can work some way of the file being deleted as soon as the download has finished?

OK i'm assuming that there's no way of holding the file in virtual memory rather than saving it to disk. Thanks for pointing me towards the tempnam() function this could prove useful. But, i still need to find out how to do the following:

if(userHasDownlodedFile || userIsNavigatingAway) {

unlink($tempname);

}

Weedpacket

Easiest (unless generating the CSV would be way too slow, but perhaps not even then) would be to generate the data and output it on the fly.

The client doesn't know where the server is getting its response from, and wouldn't care anyway. So long as you send the right content-type headers to start with, you can generate and output the CSV directly to the client, which will receive it and treat it the way it would any other CSV file quite happily. No need to temporarily save it anywhere.

In short, the page the download link refers to is the script that generates the CSV. And instead of that script saving the CSV, it outputs it.