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Force Download and Prompt User to Save Media from the Sitecore Media Library

Posted on by jammykam

Recently on Slack Chat a question got asked by fellow MVP Jason Bert about how to prompt a user to save an item from the Sitecore Media Library. Whether a user is prompted to download media depends on a few factors:

  • Whether the browser or an associated plugin understands how to process that mime type
  • Settings under mediaLibrary\mediaTypes in the Sitecore section of config
  • The response headers sent by the server, and whether Content-Disposition=attachment

It’s this final header which we need to add ourselves in the Response headers. I shared some code but was pretty surprised when it did not work. Previously in an earlier version of Sitecore I had simply tapped into the getMediaStream pipeline and then set Content-Disposition=true header based on a url parameter. Something had obviously changed, or I was going mad. Most likely a combination of both…

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Domain Sharding Media Requests in Sitecore

Posted on by jammykam

There have been a number posts about using Sitecore with a CDN provider and there is even a Sitecore CDN Connector module available Marketplace. Although the benefits of using a CDN provider are fairly well stated, such as reducing load on your server and allowing distributed datacentres, Sitecore itself does a pretty good job with its Media Library and for the vast majority of projects using a CDN may be overkill. Bedsides, there have been various projects I’ve worked on where they did not want the additional expense for little benefit or were unable to use a CDN to due to company policy or project requirements/specifications.

A project I was recently working on was utilising Edge Caching services from Akamai. If you’ve never used this type of service before, you need to re-route requests to your site to Akamai (by changing the DNS entry to point there). You can then configure Akamai as to which type of content should be served from cache and which needs to be forwarded on to your own server. There is nothing else for you to change, i.e. you do not need to provide a different domain prefix for your media items. This was an existing setup to the project from a previous vendor and seemed to work pretty well to meet the clients needs. One of the benefits we lose from not having a different domain name is the ability to domain shard.

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