Displaying normal pages during a download

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Hi Guys,

You know how here at CP the download links on articles lead you to a normal CP "download" page even though the address in the URL bar ends with ".zip" and is the URL of the file you are downloading?

Could someone throw me a lead on how this sort of behaviour is implemented so I can do the same on my own site? I don't know the terms I should be googling for.

Cheers. :-)

Posted 4-Oct-14 14:59pm

Mitchell J.

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[no name] 4-Oct-14 21:01pm

URL rewriting?

Mitchell J. 4-Oct-14 21:04pm

Yeah that's what I suspected might be involved... Thanks.

[no name] 4-Oct-14 21:11pm

np

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2014-10-04T15:11:00

The file name does not affect the content type. In other words, the URL which ends with ".zip" can provide a resource which is actually HTML, or anything else. Here is how it is implemented: "content-type" is one of the HTTP headers which defines further processing of an HTTP response.
Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Response_fields[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_media_type[^].

—SA