[SOLVED] Present document outside of web path for download

[JD*]

Hello all,

 

Trying to see if this is easier than I think it is. I have a small web portal for teachers to upload documents for their current students to be archived over the course of their years. In order to semi-protect the documents, I'm storing them outside of the normal web path. What happens is that when a teacher logs in, it gets their current students, which she can then click on and see what documents have been uploaded for that student.

 

What I'm a little confused about is how to let them click on the link and then get that document. I plan on having a function that will check their access one more time, to make sure they're allowed to see that student's document, and then finding it in the proper folder and acting like a normal PDF download (all docs are PDFs), but I'm not sure if I should use a complicated fopen, fread etc or if it's just as simple as changing the header to point to the file where it resides on the server.

 

Any ideas?

[RussellReal]

you need to access the file with PHP, you can't direct your user's client to the file..

 

and it isn't that hard

 

say its 1 directory back from the website's base directory

 

you'd just do $filename = '../'.$filename;

 

and then fopen, fread, and then set the mimetype of the document and I think its uhm application/pdf or sumfin like that, using header() for example

 

header('Content-Type: Application/PDF');

 

and then echo all the data you got from the file into the page and then the page should either act like a download of the pdf file, or open it in the web browser acrobat reader addon thingy

[JD*]

Thought so, but it's been one of those days where I'm second guessing everything. Thanks!