Allow users to Download documents from server

Question

Hello Everybody,
I am working on an Flex application where I have to allow the
users to Open/Save documents such as Word document, Excel sheet,
PDFs, Jpeg, Media files (any digital format document) when a user
clicks on a link present in a Flex application. To do this I am
using the navigateToURL() method and simply passing the URL string
as a URLRequest to the navigateToURL method. This works fine but
whenenver the link is invoked and the user selects to Save the
Excel sheet or any document it displays an unwanted browser window
behind the Open/Save/Cancel dialog box saying action cancelled.
I can not use "_self" as I require the Flex application to
run as is. I tried using the javascript:window.open() but this did
not work.
1) Is there a process to stop the browser window from
opening?
2) How can we invoke a javascript using navigateToURL(), I
tried to invoke javascript.alert('Ok') and also
javascript:window.open() both did not function.
3) Is there any other method or flex classes etc. to invoke
external applications (allow to download documents from server)?
Please help me.
Thanks and Regards,
Paromita

Answer 1

Paromita,
You could use the file download functionality. This is from
the docs:
You can let users download files from a server using the
FileReference.download() method, which takes two parameters:
request and defaultFileName. The first parameter is the URLRequest
object that contains the URL of the file to download. The second
parameter is optional--it lets you specify a default filename that
appears in the download file dialog box. If you omit the second
parameter, defaultFileName, the filename from the specified URL is
used.
The following code downloads a file named index.xml from the
same directory as the SWF document:
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("index.xml");
var fileRef:FileReference = new FileReference();
fileRef.download(request);
To set the default name to currentnews.xml instead of
index.xml, specify the defaultFileName parameter, as the following
snippet shows:
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("index.xml");
var fileToDownload:FileReference = new FileReference();
fileToDownload.download(request, "currentnews.xml");
I think this will accomplish what you are trying to do.
Vygo