I'm writing a web application that generates reports from a local database. I want to generate an excel spreadsheet and immediately cause the user to download it. However, when I try to return the file via HttpResponse, I can not open the file. However, if I try to open the file in storage, the file opens perfectly fine.
This is using Django 2.1 (for database reasons, I'm not using 2.2) and I'm generating the file with xlrd. There is another excel spreadsheet that will need to be generated and downloaded that uses the openpyxl library (both libraries serve very distinct purposes IMO).
This spreadsheet is not very large (5x6 column s xrows).
I've looked at other similar stack overflow questions and followed their instructions. Specifically, I am talking about this answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/36394206/6411417
As you can see in my code, the logic is nearly the same and yet I can not open the downloaded excel spreadsheets. The only difference is that my file name is generated when the file is generated and returned into the file_name
variable.
def make_lrm_summary_file(request):
file_path = make_lrm_summary()
if os.path.exists(file_path):
with open(file_path, 'rb') as fh:
response = HttpResponse(fh.read(), content_type="application/vnd.ms-excel")
response['Content-Disposition'] = f'inline; filename="{ os.path.basename(file_path) }"'
return response
raise Http404
Again, the file is properly generated and stored on my server but the download itself is providing an excel file that can not be opened. Specifically, I get the error message:
EXCEL.EXE - Application Error | The application was unable to start correctly (0x0000005). Click OK to close the application.