Joomla - Force File Download / CSV Export
- by lautaro.dragan
I'm in need of help... this is my first time asking a question in SO, so please be kind :)
I'm trying to force-download a file from php, so when the user hits a certain button, he gets a file download. The file is a csv (email, username) of all registered users.
I decided to add this button to the admin users screen, as you can see in this screenshot.
So I added the following code to the addToolbar function in administrator/components/com_users/views/users/view.html.php:
JToolBarHelper::custom('users.export', 'export.png', 'export_f2.png', 'Exportar', false);
This button is mapped to the following function in the com_users\controller\users.php controller:
public function exportAllUsers() {
ob_end_clean();
$app = JFactory::getApplication();
header("Content-type: text/csv");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=ideary_users.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo "email,name\n";
$model = $this->getModel("Users");
$users = $model->getAllUsers();
foreach ($users as $user) {
echo $user->email . ", " . ucwords(trim($user->name)) . "\r\n";
}
$app->close();
}
Now, this is actually working perfectly fine.
The issue here is that after I download a file, if I hit any button in the admin that causes a POST, instead of it performing the action it should, it just downloads the file over again!
For example:
I hit the "Export" button
"users.csv" downloads
Then, I hit the "search" button
"users.csv" downloads... what the hell?
I'm guessing that when I hit the export button, a JS gets called and sets a form's action attribute to an URL... and expects a response or something, and then other button's are prevented from re-setting the form's action attribute. I can't think of any real solution for this, but I'd rather avoid hacks if possible.
So, what would be the standard, elegant solution that joomla offers in this case?
