Force to open “Save As…” popup open at text link click for PDF in HTML

Question

I have some big size PDF catalogs at my website, and I need to link these as download. When I googled, I found such a thing noted below. It should open the \"Save As

Answer 1

I just had a very similar issue with the added problem that I needed to create download links to files inside a ZIP file.

I first tried to create a temporary file, then provided a link to the temporary file, but I found that some browsers would just display the contents (a CSV Excel file) rather than offering to download. Eventually I found the solution by using a servlet. It works both on Tomcat and GlassFish, and I tried it on Internet Explorer 10 and Chrome.

The servlet takes as input a full path name to the ZIP file, and the name of the file inside the zip that should be downloaded.

Inside my JSP file I have a table displaying all the files inside the zip, with links that say: onclick='download?zip=<%=zip%>&csv=<%=csv%>'

The servlet code is in download.java:

package myServlet;

import java.io.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.util.zip.*;
import java.util.*;

// Extend HttpServlet class
public class download extends HttpServlet {

    public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
        throws ServletException, IOException
    {
        PrintWriter out = response.getWriter(); // now we can write to the client

        String filename = request.getParameter("csv");
        String zipfile = request.getParameter("zip");

        String aLine = "";

        response.setContentType("application/x-download");
        response.setHeader( "Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + filename); // Force 'save-as'
        ZipFile zip = new ZipFile(zipfile);
        for (Enumeration e = zip.entries(); e.hasMoreElements();) {
            ZipEntry entry = (ZipEntry) e.nextElement();
            if(entry.toString().equals(filename)) {
                InputStream is = zip.getInputStream(entry);
                BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8"), 65536);
                while ((aLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
                    out.println(aLine);
                }
                is.close();
                break;
            }
        }
    }
}

To compile on Tomcat you need the classpath to include tomcat\lib\servlet-api.jar or on GlassFish: glassfish\lib\j2ee.jar

But either one will work on both. You also need to set your servlet in web.xml.