Here’s a servlet code example to download a text file from a website.

Download Request

Let’s say a text file named “testing.txt” , and you want to let user download it with a URL , for example “http://localhost:8080/servlet/DownloadDemo” .

Solution

1) Create a text file named “testing.txt” , put in project root folder

\--servlet (project root folder)
       \--testing.txt (download file here)
       \--WEB-INF
            \--web.xml

2) Servlet code as follow

package com.mkyong;
 
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import javax.servlet.ServletContext;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
 
public class ServletDownloadDemo extends HttpServlet{
 
  private static final int BYTES_DOWNLOAD = 1024;
 
  public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, 
   HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException{
	response.setContentType("text/plain");
	response.setHeader("Content-Disposition",
                     "attachment;filename=downloadname.txt");
	ServletContext ctx = getServletContext();
	InputStream is = ctx.getResourceAsStream("/testing.txt");
 
	int read=0;
	byte[] bytes = new byte[BYTES_DOWNLOAD];
	OutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
 
	while((read = is.read(bytes))!= -1){
		os.write(bytes, 0, read);
	}
	os.flush();
	os.close();	
   }
}

The “getResourceAsStream()” method with a forward slash (“/”), which represent the root of your web application.

3) Deployment descriptor as follow

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee 
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
 
	<display-name>serlvetdemo</display-name>
 
	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>ServletName</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>com.mkyong.ServletDownloadDemo</servlet-class>
	</servlet>
 
	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>ServletName</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/DownloadDemo</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

4) Compiled it and copy it to the following Tomcat folder

\--Tomcat
     \--webapps
          \--servlet 
               \-- testing.txt (download file)
               \--WEB-INF 
                    \--web.xml
                    \--classes
                         \--com
                              \--mkyong
                                  \--ServletDownloadDemo.class

4) Done , access http://localhost:8080/servlet/DownloadDemo to download the text file

Here’s another file download example in Struts

This article was posted in Servlet category.

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