Entry
How do I force user to save and download a .exe file without displaying a run option ?
Dec 13th, 2000 04:14
Juergen Thelen, David H,
As far as I know there's no javascript method to block the run option
in the standard file save dialog (the one that comes up when you left
click an URL whose HREF tag is armed with an .exe file name).
For IE4+ it is possible to skip the standard file save dialog by using
something like document.execCommand('SaveAs', null, 'whatever.htm'),
but this only works for HTM(L) and TXT files, and not for EXEs.
The only workaround that comes to my mind is to simply block left click
functionality of the appropriate HREF while notifying the user, that he
or she has to right click the link, and select 'Save Target/Link as...'
instead.
For IE4+/NN4 this can be achieved very simple, as this snippets shows:
--- snip ---
<html>
<head>
<title>FAQTS - Juergen Thelen - Download .EXE w/o Open dialog (IE4+/NN4)
</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p><a onClick="alert('Please right click and use \'Save Target/Link
as\'.'); return false" href="thefile.exe">thefile.exe</a></p>
<p><a onMouseOver="self.status='restricted info'; return true"
onMouseOut="self.status=''" onClick="alert('Please right click and use
\'Save Target/Link as\'.'); return false"
href="thefile.exe">thefile.exe</a>
</p>
</body>
</html>
--- snap ---
The first link shown by this example has all you need.
We need HREF here because the 'Save Target/Link as..." function of the
context menu (popping up by right click) takes the URL to the .exe file
to be downloaded from this HREF.
On the other hand we have to prevent that left clicking this HREF will
pop up the standard open dialog, so we gonna use the higher priority of
onClick vs HREF to first notify the user how to download and then
cancel this left click by returning false.
The second link shown by this example additionally uses onMouseOver and
onMouseOut to modify the message usually shown in the browser statusbar.
This one comes handy when you don't want the user to see the fully
qualified URL to this HREF at the first blush...
Hth, Juergen
