Is there a way to tell a browser to download a file as a different name than as it exists on disk?
I'm stupid. Right in the Flask API docs it says you can include the parameter attachment_filename in send_from_directory if it differs from the filename in the filesystem.
I am trying to serve up some user uploaded files with Flask, and have an odd problem, or at least one that I couldn't turn up any solutions for by searching. I need the files to retain their original filenames after being uploaded, so they will have the same name when the user downloads them. Originally I did not want to deal with databases at all, and solved the problem of filename conflicts by storing each file in a randomly named folder, and just pointing to that location for the download. However, stuff came up later that required me to use a database to store some info about the files, but I still kept my old method of handling filename conflicts. I have a model for my files now and storing the name would be as simple as just adding another field, so that shouldn't be a big problem. I decided, pretty foolishly after I had written the implmentation, on using Amazon S3 to store the files. Apparently S3 does not deal with folders in the way a traditional filesystem does, and I do not want to deal with the surely convoluted task of figuring out how to create folders programatically on S3, and in retrospect, this was a stupid way of dealing with this problem in the first place, when stuff like SQLalchemy exists that makes databases easy as pie.  Anyway, I need a way to store multiple files with the same name on s3, without using folders. I thought of just renaming the files with a random UUID after they are uploaded, and then when they are downloaded (the user visits a page and presses a download button so I need not have the filename in the URL), telling the browser to save the file as its original name retrieved from the database. Is there a way to implement this in Python w/Flask? When it is deployed I am planning on having the web server handle the serving of files, will it be possible to do something like this with the server? Or is there a smarter solution?