using PHP to bypass .htaccess ?

[rogerios]

Hi.

I have chosen to protect my website using .htaccess since I use a LeftFrame for navigation, and a MainFrame to load PDF Documents.

Now, I have three different sites, and, I need a 'User Manager' interface which allows the admin to control user access to any combination of these sites. I have actually used a global PHP login, which provides respective access to a PHP file with this line only:

header("Location: [a href=\"http://username:password@website_X");\" target=\"_blank\"]http://username:password@website_X");[/a]
* That would forward the user and somewhat secretly bypass the browser's request for a new password. Since IE now prohibits passwords within URLs by default, this can no longer be achieved...

The question is, how can I protect those PDF documents and authenticate via PHP, using a MySQL database to keep track of user details?

Does $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] and $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] have anything to do with .htaccess? Could this be an alternative?

Thank you :)

Roger

[rogerios]

To answer my own question (after more research).

This can be achieved with these lines:

<?php
$pdf = 'dummy.pdf';
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
//header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$pdf.'"');
readfile($pdf);
?>

...just in case anyone else is searching on this topic :)