R – Flex 3 – Send a HTTP Get request from Flash and want Firefox to show Open With Box

firefoxflex3http

I am a newb developer as far as Flex and Flash is concerned. This is what I'm trying to do:

1) Send a HTTP request to our server (with a custom made URL). The URL basically tells the server to send data in a CSV format.
2) The server sends a 200 OK response, which has Content-Type: application/csv and the payload is pure CSV data.

What I wish to do is, when firefox gets this 200 OK response, I want it to show the standard Open with box (the one that shows up when you download some file).

I tried doing this with HTTPService. I have a "Export to CSV" button on the flash component. Upon clicking that, the flash component is able to succesfully send the HTTP request. I however don't want Flash component to handle the response, so I don't have the 's "result" tag defined. But nothing happens. Any suggestions on how to do this.

Best Answer

You will need Flash to at least respond to the request, then you call navigateToURL to go to your file, something like this:

private function resultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void
{
    navigateToURL(new URLRequest('createdFile.csv','_self'));
}

Related Solutions

Php – How to send a GET request from PHP

Unless you need more than just the contents of the file, you could use file_get_contents.

$xml = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/file.xml");

For anything more complex, I'd use cURL.

Rest – HTTP GET with request body

Roy Fielding's comment about including a body with a GET request.

Yes. In other words, any HTTP request message is allowed to contain a message body, and thus must parse messages with that in mind. Server semantics for GET, however, are restricted such that a body, if any, has no semantic meaning to the request. The requirements on parsing are separate from the requirements on method semantics.

So, yes, you can send a body with GET, and no, it is never useful to do so.

This is part of the layered design of HTTP/1.1 that will become clear again once the spec is partitioned (work in progress).

....Roy

Yes, you can send a request body with GET but it should not have any meaning. If you give it meaning by parsing it on the server and changing your response based on its contents, then you are ignoring this recommendation in the HTTP/1.1 spec, section 4.3:

...if the request method does not include defined semantics for an entity-body, then the message-body SHOULD be ignored when handling the request.

And the description of the GET method in the HTTP/1.1 spec, section 9.3:

The GET method means retrieve whatever information ([...]) is identified by the Request-URI.

which states that the request-body is not part of the identification of the resource in a GET request, only the request URI.

Update

The RFC2616 referenced as "HTTP/1.1 spec" is now obsolete. In 2014 it was replaced by RFCs 7230-7237. Quote "the message-body SHOULD be ignored when handling the request" has been deleted. It's now just "Request message framing is independent of method semantics, even if the method doesn't define any use for a message body" The 2nd quote "The GET method means retrieve whatever information ... is identified by the Request-URI" was deleted. - From a comment

From the HTTP 1.1 2014 Spec:

A payload within a GET request message has no defined semantics; sending a payload body on a GET request might cause some existing implementations to reject the request.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – How to send a GET request from PHP

Rest – HTTP GET with request body

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