Sending a file to the Response failure

Question

Hello everybody,
I have to send a file to the response for the browser to show a save/open file dialog box to the user, so he/she can download it and save in in his/her local file system. As expected the file is stored in a specific directory in the file system of the server.
What I did was to call this method within a commandLink component:
public String downloadDB(){
      FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
      HttpServletRequest request = ( HttpServletRequest )
                                 context.getExternalContext().getRequest(  );
      HttpServletResponse response =
         ( HttpServletResponse ) context.getExternalContext().getResponse();
      String filePath = null;
      int read = 0;
      byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];
      filePath = getMyDBPath();
      response.setContentType("application/pdf");
      FileInputStream fis = null;
      OutputStream os = null;
      try {
         fis = new FileInputStream(new File(filePath));
         os = response.getOutputStream();
         while((read = fis.read(bytes)) != -1){
            os.write(bytes,0,read);
         os.flush();
         os.close();
      catch ( FileNotFoundException e1 ) {
         logger.error(e1);
         logger.info(e1.getMessage());
         request.setAttribute("errors", "File Not Found.");
      catch ( IOException ioe ) {
         logger.error(ioe);
         logger.info(ioe.getMessage());
         request.setAttribute("errors", "Error reading file.");
      return "";
   }After the user clicks on the commandLink, the page I'm working on, gets refreshed and at the top of it appears the text of the file I tried to download. This is not the expected behaviour, what should I do?
thanks a lot,
Johnny

Answer 1

I have found the solution, some googling and in another differente JSF forum.
what I missed was to include in the header this:
response.setHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment; filename="+filename);With that line it works perfect.
thanks.