saving MS Excel doco with correct name

hi all,
have an application which i wrote which generates a report and exports data to MS excel. When i attempt to open the doco without saving it first (by selecting 'Open' from the File Downloader), the application opens the doco with a weird name rather than the name i am setting in the application. Cant figure out why its doing that, has anyone come across this sort if problem before ??

Am using java 1.4.2 and MS Excel 2003 SP3

thanks in advance.

You normally set the file name in the content disposition header. Most self-respected web browsers respects and takes its value.

Only some widely used web browser developed by a team in Redmond completely ignores it and takes the part after the last slash in the request URL as file name. If it isn't present, then a temporary file name will be generated. Sad, but true. Fortunately its market coverage continues shrinking as for now.

Best what you can do is to append the actual file name to the request URL. Something like http://example.com/webapp/fileservlet/filename.xls

thanks for the reply Bauke. I did set the file name in the content disposition header ;

res.setHeader("Content-Disposition", contentDisposition + "; filename=" + contentFileName);

for some reason i cant get to the http://example.com/webapp/fileservlet/filename.xls URL.

thanks again.

I believe Bauke was showing an example of how to create a URL including the extension. It wasn't meant to be a real link.

I'm not sure your code is quite right, as we don't know what the 'contentDisposition' variable is, and I'm not sure why it is a variable in any case:

res.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + filename);

It was indeed just an example URL.

If you want an actual code example, then you may find this useful: http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/07/fileservlet.html

That said, don´t forget to quote the filename in the content disposition header. Otherwise filenames with spaces become garbled as well.

ah i see. thanks heaps for your help.