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Joan Bondira wonders: <<I'm trying to build a web-based document library,
and I want one of those download boxes to open when a user clicks a button
next to a listed file. Can anyone tell me how to accomplish this?>>
This is controlled in part by how the user of the browser selects a link and
how the browser is configured; if you click a link, the program usually
tries to open it rather than downloading it. For example, most Acrobat
documents open when you click on their link, but if you select the link by
right-clicking on it (I believe that's Command-Click on the Mac, but it
might be Control-Click), you get a popup menu that lets you download the
file instead. I believe that you can also open the Download dialog box by
coding the link using ftp:// instead of http:// as the prefix to the url;
this instructs the browser to use the file transfer protocol for downloads
rather than the hypertext protocol for displaying documents. Unfortunately,
I can't test this right now.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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