Download file of any type in Asp.Net MVC using FileResult?

Anders picture Anders · Aug 31, 2010 · Viewed 445.1k times · Source

I've had it suggested to me that I should use FileResult to allow users to download files from my Asp.Net MVC application. But the only examples of this I can find always has to do with image files (specifying content type image/jpeg).

But what if I can't know the file type? I want users to be able to download pretty much any file from the filearea of my site.

I had read one method of doing this (see a previous post for the code), that actually works fine, except for one thing: the name of the file that comes up in the Save As dialog is concatenated from the file path with underscores (folder_folder_file.ext). Also, it seems people think I should return a FileResult instead of using this custom class that I had found BinaryContentResult.

Anyone know the "correct" way of doing such a download in MVC?

EDIT: I got the answer (below), but just thought I should post the full working code if someone else is interested:

public ActionResult Download(string filePath, string fileName)
{
    string fullName = Path.Combine(GetBaseDir(), filePath, fileName);

    byte[] fileBytes = GetFile(fullName);
    return File(
        fileBytes, System.Net.Mime.MediaTypeNames.Application.Octet, fileName);
}

byte[] GetFile(string s)
{
    System.IO.FileStream fs = System.IO.File.OpenRead(s);
    byte[] data = new byte[fs.Length];
    int br = fs.Read(data, 0, data.Length);
    if (br != fs.Length)
        throw new System.IO.IOException(s);
    return data;
}

Answer

Ian Henry picture Ian Henry · Aug 31, 2010

You can just specify the generic octet-stream MIME type:

public FileResult Download()
{
    byte[] fileBytes = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(@"c:\folder\myfile.ext");
    string fileName = "myfile.ext";
    return File(fileBytes, System.Net.Mime.MediaTypeNames.Application.Octet, fileName);
}