rdDownload Folder

The rdDownload folder is the home of a number of other temporary files. For example, when debugging links are turned on and trace pages are created, the XML debug files are stored here. Uploaded files, oddly enough, temporarily reside here, too, before being relocated, and exports also use this folder for temporary files.

There is no way to rename or relocate this folder.

Developers who need to store data in temporary files are free to use these folders, too (traditionally, rdDownload). And it's a very good idea to do so. The server account under which Logi applications run typically has been granted Write permissions to these folders, so files can be written there.

Securing rdDownload

When reports or data are exported from Report definitions, the rdDownload folder temporarily contains exported PDF, Excel, etc. files in order to make them available for download by the user who created them. By default, these files have names based on GUIDs, so directly accessing them without permission by guessing their names is possible but unlikely. However, if you'd like to further secure these files, you can engage two special features.

• The first feature requires that the Session ID of the user requesting an export file download match that of the user who created the export file, otherwise an HTTP 403 error is returned.

• The second feature ensures that supporting files used in the process of creating an export, and saved in rdDownload, are deleted once the export file is created but before it's streamed back to the requesting user.

To enable these features, you must manually alter the Logi application's web.config file, in the application's root folder. The file already contains the code required and all you have to do is uncomment it to enable it. Here's the code:
 

<!-- Uncomment the following rdDownloadSecPageHandler verb in the httpHandlers section to enable the automatic deletion of export files in the rdDownload directory. This also enables additional security for these files.  -->
<system.web>
<!--
    <httpHandlers>
            <add verb="*" path="rdDownload/*" type="rdServer.rdDownloadSecPageHandler,rdServer"/>      
    </httpHandlers>
-->
</system.web>
<!--  Uncomment the  rdDownloadSecPageHandler in the system.webServer section to enable rdDownload directory Security   -->
<system.webServer>
<!--
      <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/>
          <handlers>
             <add  verb="*" path="rdDownload/*" name="rdDownloadSecPageHandler" type="rdServer.rdDownloadSecPageHandler,rdServer" resourceType="Unspecified"/>
        </handlers>
-->
</system.webServer>

These features do not apply to exports created using Process Tasks.

Without these feature, these files are cleaned up periodically - see Temporary File Clean Up.