I have a controller method that is supposed to force-download an asset uploaded via backend. The method recieves the ID of such asset and uses SS_HTTPRequest.

The problem is that although i can directly access the asset in the template via $File.URL I can't read it via php because file_exists says $File.URL does not exists.

This is the method source

public function download(){

	$assetID = $this->request->param('ID');

	$do = DataObject::get_by_id('File', $assetID);
	
	if($do && file_exists($do->URL)){
	    return SS_HTTPRequest::send_file(file_get_contents($do->URL), $do->Name);
	}else{
	    echo 'error with ' . $do->URL . ' (' . file_exists($do->URL) . ')';
	    return false;
	}

    }

Am I missing something here?
Thanks in advance

After an our of trying i solved it with this piece of code

public function download(){

	$assetID = $this->request->param('ID');

	$do = DataObject::get_by_id('File', $assetID);
	
	if($do){
	    return SS_HTTPRequest::send_file(file_get_contents(Director::absoluteBaseURL() . $do->Filename), $do->Name);
	}else{
	    return false;
	}

    }

Seems the combination "Director::absoluteBaseURL() . $do->Filename" did the trick.

Still I would like to know if this was the best approach for the situation

Its a decent method. The only other thing I've ever done is manually build the whole response header when pushing a temporary zip file to the browser, which is even messy-er :)

looks nice but I can't seem to find how to use it in template. can you help ?

In a template you use $File.Filename to get the path of File. $File.Title will return the name of the file with the dashes converted to spaces. So my-filename becomes "my filename". and $File.Name will return the system filename with dashes

In the particular case of the project I was developing, the part of the template that used the controller method on the template looked like this

<% control Songs %>
	<li>
	    <span class="title bodoni">{$Pos}. $Title</span>
	    <a href="$Top.Link(download)/$SongFile.ID" title="$Title.XML">Download</a>
	</li>
<% end_control %>

I hope this helps.

What does the Dataobject look like? You're calling $Top but you didn't include the parent control. $Top temporarily breaks you out of the $Songs control loop

That's right, it DOES break you out of the $Songs control loop, but that's the whole point since the method I defined is in the controller and not in the model, using $Link inside the $Songs control loop would only give me the link to the current song being listed.

Instead, with $Top, I get the link to the current page and its "download" method, passing also the current $SongFile.ID.