Author Topic: Temporary downloadable files -- best practice?  (Read 2210 times)

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Offline Michael_Lee

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Temporary downloadable files -- best practice?
« on: September 16, 2011, 07:43:41 pm »
I'm taking user input (in a text box or whatever), and trying to make a file the user can then download.  What is the best way of managing the newly created files?

Should I assign them a unique name, based on a hash or something?  Or is there a way to preserve filenames without risking accidental name collision?

I really don't want a bunch of files to be created and slowly take up a huge amount of memory -- what's the best way of managing and purging temporary downloadable files?

(I'm trying to make something based of off Javascript and Python).
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Offline calc84maniac

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Re: Temporary downloadable files -- best practice?
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2011, 07:51:40 pm »
Maybe this? http://docs.python.org/library/tempfile.html

Edit: On the note of preserving filename, perhaps you could create a temporary directory with tempfile.mkdtemp() and put your file in that.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 07:56:54 pm by calc84maniac »
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Offline Juju

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Re: Temporary downloadable files -- best practice?
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2011, 10:08:09 pm »
You might want to make a script that output the file you're generating without putting it in a temp file on disk (with print or something instead of the function you use to write to a file, I don't really know Python). You can then specify the MIME type and the filename with appropriate HTTP headers.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 10:09:19 pm by Juju »

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