[RESOLVED] Download Script That Updates DB AND Starts Download

rsmith

I have a page, index.php, that has a link to my download script, dl.php. The link will look something like this in the browser:

<a href="dl.php?id=1">Download Now</a>

As you can guess dl.php will get the id, query the database for the path to the file and get the current download count, and then needs to do 3 things:

Start the download.
Update the download count; if the download count already has a specified value, it needs to not run the download and instead, redirect to my custom error.php with a custom error code that then tells the user "Sorry, this file can not be downloaded today."

and

Redirect the user to a thank you page.

What is the best method for accomplishing this? Obviously using header() to force the download stops the processing everything right there and from that point I cannot redirect to the thank you page.

Weedpacket

Other sites that provide downloads and a thank-you page (Sourceforge is the first that springs to mind, but if you've ever downloaded software off the web then you've probably seen it done elsewhere as well) do it by serving the thank-you page which then performs a client-side redirect to the actual download file (plus a direct link should the client-side redirect fail).

rsmith

Thanks weedpacket. So in my case I'd build a blank template page and only if the sql is successful would it say Thanks, otherwise it'd display errors. I'll see how this goes and if I have problems I'll post.

rsmith

UPDATE: I have it working the way you suggested weedpacket, thanks. But I wanted to try and use headers so that the download.php page isn't actually visited. Instead when the user clicks on the link to download the file that points to download.php?id=1 I would use header() to instantaneously start the download and the user doesn't have to leave their current page.

I coded up this based on examples I found:

header('Pragma: public');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: private',false);
header("Content-Type: application/zip");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".basename($dlinfo['zip_path'])."");
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');

readfile($dlinfo['zip_path']);

It downloads a zip file with the proper name from the path but the file is not a valid archive. I've verified that if I just echo the $dlinfo['zip_path'] to a href text link and click on it, it will work just fine. Is there some trick to user header() to force a download that I'm missing?

rsmith

I figured it out. I had to tweak something in the path for the readfile() to work. Thanks for all the help anyways man.