In TurboGears, I had to implement a file download method, but the file required access controls so it was put in a directory not exported by Apache.
In #turbogears I've been pointed at:
http://cherrypy.org/wiki/FileDownload
and this is everything put together:
from cherrypy.lib.cptools import serveFile
# In cherrypy 3 it should be:
#from cherrypy.lib.static import serve_file
@expose()
def get(self, *args, **kw):
"""Access the file pointed by the given path"""
pathname = check_auth_and_compute_pathname()
return serveFile(pathname)
Then I needed to export some CSV:
@expose()
def getcsv(self, *args, **kw):
"""Get the data in CSV format"""
rows = compute_data_rows()
headers = compute_headers(rows)
filename = compute_file_name()
cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Type'] = "application/x-download"
cherrypy.response.headers['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename="'+filename+'"'
csvdata = StringIO.StringIO()
writer = csv.writer(csvdata)
writer.writerow(headers)
writer.writerows(rows)
return csvdata.getvalue()
In my case it's not an issue as I can only compute the headers after I computed all the data, but I still have to find out how to serve the CSV file while I'm generating it, instead of storing it all into a big string and returning the big string.