How to set response filename without forcing “save as” dialog

Question

I am returning a stream in some response setting the appropriate content-type header. The behavior I'm looking for is this:

• If the browser is able to render content of the given content type then it should display it in the browser window.

• If the browser doesn't know how to render the content, then it should display the "save as" dialog where the filename should be the one provided in the response.

The problem is that if I set the Content-Disposition header with:

"attachment; filename="myfile.txt""

the browser will always display the "save as" dialog.

If I don't set Content-Disposition, the filename used in the "save as" dialog is the one in the URL that doesn't work in my case.

I also tried setting Content-Disposition to inline but the outcome is the same.

Answer 1

The correct way could be:

Content-Disposition: inline; filename="myfile.txt"

Answer 2

I'm not sure if that's possible by default. Due to security concerns, browsers don't send all content-types they can handle, but just a few Accept-Encoding, which doesn't help a lot in your scenario.

Maybe you can ask your user what they prefer and store that information in their profile.