What are some best practices for handling user interactions and tracking successful downloads of on-the-fly generated files in PHP?

When generating files on-the-fly in PHP, it's important to handle user interactions properly and track successful downloads. One best practice is to set appropriate headers before outputting the file content to ensure the file is downloaded correctly. Additionally, you can track successful downloads by logging the download request or updating a download counter in your database. 

// Set appropriate headers for file download
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="generated_file.txt"');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
header('Pragma: public');

// Output the file content
echo "File content goes here...";

// Log the download request or update download counter in database
// For example, you can insert a record into a download log table

Keywords

file generation user interactions tracking downloads PHP functions error handling

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