redirect and force download
this is my problem: I have some pdf files on a server, my Django web-application is hosted on another server (not the same of the pdf files). On my appplication i know the pdf files link on the other server. I want to download that pdf files through my application without read them on web server application.
I try to explane. If i click on download link, my browser shows the pdf into his internal pdf viewer. I don't want this, i want that on click on a button the user will download the file without open it on internal browser.
I looked here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/request-response/#telling-the-browser-to-treat-the-response-as-a-file-attachment but this is not a good way for me, cause it requires that I read the file inside my web-application and after return it to the user.
Is it possible??
Answer
Hmm, sounds like the wrong tool for the job. You can't really "redirect" and modify the response header, which means using django just to set the Content-Disposition header would require you to stream the file through django, then have django stream it to the client.
Let a lighter weight web server handle that. If you happen to be using nginx, here's an awesome solution that fits your scenario 99% (the 1% being it's rails setting the header that nginx is waiting for).
If all you want is to set the header and the file doesn't need django processing, it would be even easier to proxy!
If you are not using nginx, I would change the title to a web server specific question about proxying a file & setting headers.