How to make a file download with counter?
Apr 04th, 2011
A day back i just had a very interesting query from one of my friend who has asked me over “What if i want to download a file but also keep track of no of downloads” but with a special case that the download link should be hidden from the user. It means that download link shouldn’t be viewable to the user.
Like : <a href=”http://www.example.com/filename.doc”>Download Document</a>
It should be something hidden. In order to resolve this case, I came up with the following suggestions:
- Instead of passing the direct filename pass the id of the file (give file a id) e.g 1234
- Pass the File Id to a certain piece of code which keeps the track of download and pushes the file for download
Lets Start over to make this concept a reality:
Now when a user click over the link a script is run which calls the script.php code and passes a code parameter with the id 1234.
Script File Code:
- <?php
- //Gets the file code $filecode = $_GET['code'];
- //Write here the code to get the real name of the file from the database and update the counter for that file
- //Let suppose the filename is 1234.doc
- $file = ‘downloadfile/’.$filename;
- //Rest of the code helps to push the file for download to the user
- header(‘Content-type: application/force-download’);
- header(‘Content-Transfer-Encoding: Binary’);
- header(‘Content-disposition: attachment;
- filename=”‘. basename($file) .’”‘);
- header(‘Content-length: ‘. filesize($file) );
- readfile( $file );
- ?>
You can go ahead and try out the concept, if you have any certain query post a comment out for the help.
