"Brad Clements" <bkc@murkworks.com> writes:

I'm create a CSV file that I would like browsers to get the "save as" dialog when they select it.

I'm using RESPONSE.write() to write out the CSV file, and I set the Content-Type before calling RESPONSE.write

Netscape seems to work ok, it pops up a save box for "text/csv" and "application/vnd.ms-excel".

However in both cases IE5.5 just ignores the data and re-requests the page.

Does anyone know *all* the steps I need to take to get this to work correctly with IE? I must be doing something wrong. I want to supply a CSV file, but generated dynamically. I'm sure I'm missing a header setting or something.

FWIW, I recently had to support a customer in downloading files for use by spreadsheet software. After a little investigating, especially at the IETF web/FTP site, I discovered that there is no registered MIME type "text/csv". Can anyone refute this? There is a registered MIME type "text/tab-separated-values". Based on something I read recently on the Zope site, it may be that if you set the MIME type to application/vnd.ms-excel but send a tab separated values file, excel will open it. I haven't tried this though.