Web: How to Offer Custom Download? and Manage It?

[alphaoide]

Here is the concept:
A user has options: Red, Green, and Blue
If the user pick "Red", a file will be created, "Red" is written to it, and then the file is offered to be download.

Here is what I come up with by myself. If you guys know better method, let me know. Also let me know if my system could potentially be abused.

I will allow, say, 10 downloads at a time. So I'm gonna have file01-file10. When user enters his selection, I'm gonna check if there is a file among the ten that is not opened. If there is, selection is written to the file and offered to be downloaded. If not, prompt to try again later.


EDIT:
The filename has to be the same. So my quick and dirty solution is to create each of the ten files in ten different folders. Any thoughts?

[Brian]

Here is the concept:
A user has options: Red, Green, and Blue
If the user pick "Red", a file will be created, "Red" is written to it, and then the file is offered to be download.

Here is what I come up with by myself. If you guys know better method, let me know. Also let me know if my system could potentially be abused.

I will allow, say, 10 downloads at a time. So I'm gonna have file01-file10. When user enters his selection, I'm gonna check if there is a file among the ten that is not opened. If there is, selection is written to the file and offered to be downloaded. If not, prompt to try again later.


EDIT:
The filename has to be the same. So my quick and dirty solution is to create each of the ten files in ten different folders. Any thoughts?

Just have them send a query to your script and instead of
"Content-type: text/html"

print "Content-type: whatever"
and then send them the download in binary mode.

Actually I think it's different in PHP, because perl owns you.

[alphaoide]

I don't get what you saying about using "Content-type", and yeah, I prefer PHP solution, unless it's not possible.

[sean]

By changing the content type you're not bound to a certain protocol, which should make a lot of sense in this case since you're looking for a 'custom' soultion.

ASP.NET could do something like this for sure, but for simplicity you're probably looking at doing something in Perl as Brian suggested. If the reality of your application is actually this simple, is there a reason you can't just link to files, "red.dat", "green.dat", "blue.dat", etc...?

[alphaoide]

>> By changing the content type you're not bound to a certain protocol
Okay, I'm more of a web designer than a web programmer, so what do you mean by that and how is it relevant?

Do you know if I could fopen(PHP) a file that is being downloaded? Or is there a way to know if a file is being downloaded?

P.S. The custom file will contain 6 colors and each color is one of the 16bit colors, so I could not make all the files with every combination possible.

[Waldo2k2]

so you're saying these files have images in them? Or just text? Either way, php has both image creating functions, as well as the power to easily generate any one of those combinations on the fly quickly and easily. Could you elaborate a little bit on what's going on?

[alphaoide]

What I'm offering for download is Cascading Style Sheet (.css) file.
On the web page, there will be sliders for color Red, Green, and Blue. A specific combination values of RGB will generate a color theme (consists of x number of colors). The colors will be used to specify the color of text, hyperlink, background, etc that will be written into the CSS file.
This CSS is for a particular web publishing platform. So the user will pick color, download custom CSS, upload to his website, and he'll get the layout with all the colors he picks without having to manually modify the downloaded CSS file.

[Waldo2k2]

that seems pretty easy man, you can create files with php, just create a temporary file then offer it for download. All you'd have to do is output the standard parts of the css to the file, then fill in the specific parts based on the variable from a user submitted form...that's pretty basic stuff...but what I think you really should do is just make your website more flexible, basically, output the css to your page, but the colors would be either a default value, or the value of a variable stored in a cookie on the users machine. Then you can avoid the whole downloading thing, and avoid having to help people who don't know how to apply the stylesheet to the page. Cookies are a lot easier to deal with.

[alphaoide]

The custom CSS is for *their* own websites NOT *mine*

[Waldo2k2]

well scratch the cookie idea, go with what I first said in my last post.