Setting path for "Content-disposition" filename

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to set the filename in the following:
String path = "/usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.29/webapps/myapp/my_images.zip";
response.setContentType("application/octet-stream");
response.setHeader("Content-disposition","attachment; filename=" +path);The file that I'd like the user to download is called my_images.zip. It resides here: /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.29/webapps/myapp/my_images.zip
However, when I run the servlet, it pops up a dialog box with this as the filename: usrlocal_jakarta-tomcat-4.1.29_webapps_myapp_my_images.zip
It's replaced the slashes with underscores. What's going on? The zip file resides in the root folder of my app. The servlet is in a subfolder called "fpauto".

Answer 1

Ah, ok. Right, so when you set that heading what you are saying to the client is: "The response from this web request is actually a file with the following name..."
For example you could set it to be README.TXT and then use
response.getWriter().println("Hello World.");as the only other line of your servlet. That would send a text "file" called README.TXT to the client containing the text "Hello World" only. Setting that response header doesn't tell the servlet to do anything other than inform the client what filename to use.
It would be nice if there was a method called "transmit file" or somesuch, but there isn't. The simplest reason why is that if you just want to send a file you can usually provide it directly from the web (or app) server by putting it into the content. For example create a file my_files.zip in the root of your war and it will typically be made available as a file anyway.
The assumption is that servlets are for generating content not just sending content that already exists.
However, if you have a good reason for wanting to do this, you can create a loop that reads in the file and sends its contents to the response's output stream. I usually use the commons-io IOUtil [copy |http://commons.apache.org/io/api-1.4/org/apache/commons/io/IOUtils.html#copy(java.io.InputStream,%20java.io.OutputStream)] functions to do this.
So why do you want to use a servlet to send "static" content?