The default name of the document in the Save dialog box in the browser

Question

I have JSP page which retrieves a document from a database and either displays it in the browser window(if it can be displayed as for pdf or word documents) or offers the user to save it on disk. Everything works fine except for in the latter case in the save document dialog browser offers the user to store the document with jsp page name and extention by default. I store the file name in another field in the database and want to use this name by default. Is there any way to control the name of the document which browser offers by default ?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a HTTP Header called Content-Disposition you can set the filename with that, here is some code from a JSP I use to download software from a database to the browser.
response.setContentType(doc.MimeType);
response.setContentLength(doc.BinaryData.length());
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "filename="+doc.Filename);
ServletOutputStream stream = response.getOutputStream();
byte[] data = doc.BinaryData.getBytes();
for(int i =0;i!=doc.BinaryData.length();i++) {
stream.write(data);
Now this all works in every browser except in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (ofcourse!) the "Save as" filename then is taken from the last part of the URL that looks like a file name!!! So my URL to the page that has the above code would look like /downloadSoftware.jsp?id=1234&file=somefile.ext and I don't do anything with the file parameter, it's just here for IE. This means all browsers that adhere to the HTTP standard will work and then Internet Exploder will also work...
Hope that helps