How to set up: enter email address to download a pdf file

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 14:23 -0500, joe wrote:
> .
> Joe wrote:
> > > Can anyone tell me a simple way to set up a routine on my website 
> > > so people can download a pdf file simply by entering their email 
> > > address and have the submitted email addresses saved on the web 
> > > hosting system? 
> 
> Craig responded: 
> > generally not a great idea to have apache capable of writing files
> > anywhere except to maybe a non-executable temp file system which is
> > probably not what you want to accomplish.
> > 
> > It might be easier to have a form that someone fills out that sends 
> > an email or creates a row in a database prior to downloading the 
> > file but the methodology would depend greatly on the type of code 
> > that the side is using (i.e. perl/cgi, rubyonrails, php or static 
> > html) and what the hosting server is permitting you to do. Might be 
> > a good thing to ask your hosting server.
> 
> Thanks for responding. 
> 
> I want to make it as easy as possible for people to just enter 
> their email address and have the file download and be able to 
> save/retrieve the email addresses of anyone who downloads the 
> designated file(s). 
> 
> I did ask my web host and they suggested contacting a programmer. 
> Surely there must be some generic code available to do this simple 
> task. I can work with html and shell scripts, but don't know any 
> of the other coding you mentioned. 
> 
> Any suggestions where I might find a simple, existing program 
> that I could use? 
----
can we keep this on the list?

If no predisposition exists, it would seem to be easiest to accomplish
in php.

There probably is a php snippet somewhere you can use but again, I
seriously doubt that your hosting provider is going to allow you to use
php/apache to write files of anything less than a temporary nature if at
all and the data is going to have to be stored in some other means.

The php part is probably easy enough...but having it send an email or
write to a database is probably the harder part.

I don't know where such code exists but someone else on the list might
have suggestions.

Craig