wpg_docload.download_file : mime type not recognized by client

For a project we are currently working on, we needed to generate, and send a Word 2010 document to the client. The document was generated by a great PL/SQL document generation tool called Doxxy, and was sent to the client using the wpg_docload package. This is a standard Oracle pl/sql package that can be used to download files, BLOBs and BFILEs.

Before the download, we set the Content-type in the http header as follows :

owa_util.mime_header('application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document',FALSE);

When sending the document to the client, we got the following popup in our browser :

So it looked like our browser didn’t recognized that this was an Word 2010 document.

Looking at the response header, using Firebug, we got the following result :

Somehow the content type for Word 2010 was overwritten to text/html; charset=utf-8.

So, time for the good old trial and error approach, which, after a while, paid off.

Before setting the response header to : owa_util.mime_header(‘….’,FALSE); we need to issue the following commands :

htp.flush();
htp.init();

Now the code looks like this  :

-- first clear the header
 htp.flush;
 htp.init;
 -- set up HTTP header
 owa_util.mime_header('application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document', FALSE);
 -- set the size so the browser knows how much to download
 htp.p('Content-length: ' || DBMS_LOB.getlength(v_blob));
 -- the filename will be used by the browser if the users does a save as
 htp.p('Content-Disposition:attachment; filename="'||nvl(v_filename,'export')||v_ext||'"');
 -- Set COOKIE (for javascript download plugin)
 htp.p('Set-Cookie: fileDownload=true; path=/');
 -- close the headers
 owa_util.http_header_close;
 -- download the BLOB
 wpg_docload.download_file(v_blob);

After adding these 2 lines, we got the correct mime type :

Many thanks to Willem Albert and Bjorn Fraeys for delivering the content for this blog !