What I am doing is to using PHP to get an external file, and send it to client’s browser. But the following code doesn’t pop up the downloading prompt. Using Chrome's developer tool, I can see in Network -> Response that the data is correctly fetched. But nothing happens to the browser.
<?php
header("Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=Example.zip");
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header("Content-Length: 512");
header("HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content");
$x=fopen("http://www.example.com/example.zip","r");
echo fread($x,512);
fclose($x);
exit;
?>
UPDATE: In fact, I have figured out where the problem was: I did not invoke the PHP using user's click, but javascript's XMLHttpRequest. When I directly visit my above PHP page, everything works perfectly. Sorry about that. But now the question would be: is it possible to trigger download prompt using javascript XMLHttpRequest?
UPDATE 2: So here is what I wish to accomplish: I have a page with a "download" button, clicking the button will trigger javascript XMLHttpRequest to invoke the PHP page (in this way, the browser address bar will remain the same, i.e. it will not visit the PHP page). I would like to use this background XMLHttpRequest to invoke the PHP page, which returns the content (with all legit headers, i.e. Content-Type, ...) that will invoke the download prompt for the user.
