What am I doing wrong with HttpResponse content and headers when downloading a file?
- by Slauma
I want to download a PDF file from a SQL Server database which is stored in a binary column. There is a LinkButton on an aspx page. The event handler of this button looks like this:
protected void LinkButtonDownload(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
...
byte[] aByteArray;
// Read binary data from database into this ByteArray
// aByteArray has the size: 55406 byte
Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.ClearContent();
Response.BufferOutput = true;
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + "12345.pdf");
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
using (BinaryWriter aWriter = new BinaryWriter(Response.OutputStream))
{
aWriter.Write(aByteArray, 0, aByteArray.Length);
}
}
A "File Open/Save dialog" is offered in my browser. When I store this file "12345.pdf" to disk, the file has a size of 71523 Byte. The additional 16kB at the end of the PDF file are the HTML code of my page (as I can see when I view the file in an editor). I am confused because I was believing that ClearContent and ClearHeaders would ensure that the page content is not sent together with the file content.
What am I doing wrong here?
Thanks for help!