Windows 7 / IE8 Converts AIR file to ZIP

[David_Anson]

The AIR install badge works perfectly OK for most of my customers but occasionally ther are problems.  To overcome this I have created a support page with a direct link to the .air file (and also a .air.zip for Mac OS X as this unzips the file in the download process).  When I click the Save Target As... option in IE 8 it changes the filetype from .air to .zip and then saves it as a .zip file extension.  If I manually change the file extension back to .air then it works just fine however having to talk customers through the process of showing file extensions and then making the change is not exactly professional.

Any ideas how I can overcome this? 

TIA

David Anson

[Anirudh Sasikumar]

I think setting the right content type header when serving the AIR file should do the trick.

The value should be: application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip

How you set that HTTP header will depend upon your server, I've done it on app engine by a simple: self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = "application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip"

-Anirudh

[David_Anson]

Anirudh

Not quite sure I understand where I need to apply your suggestion.

My HTML for the link to download is quite simple:

<a href="http://www.adv.co.uk/reader3/AirReader/uat/AirReader1.29.air">Windows and Linux</a>

Is it here that I need to make the change - and how - or somewhere else in the page?  The site is on a Linux server.

TIA

David

[Anirudh Sasikumar · Accepted solution]

You'll have to make the change on your Linux server.

If it is Apache, you can create a file called .htaccess in the uat directory with the following content in it:

AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip .air

David Tucker has instructions on how to get this done on various servers: http://archive.davidtucker.net/2008/01/08/update-your-air-mime-type/

-Anirudh

[David_Anson]

Worked brilliantly.  Thanks very much.