Table Of Contents

Serving Dynamically Generated FilesΒΆ

Here’s a short code example, showing how one could serve a dynamically generated image - instead of a HTML page - from a controller method:

@expose(content_type='image/jpg')
def captcha(self, **data):
    my_image = ImageGenerator(**data)
    return my_image.tostring('jpeg','RGB')

This example assumes that ImageGenerator() is a callable, which returns a PIL Image object, which is then converted into a JPEG encoded binary string using the tostring method of the Image object and then sent to the client.

This method is applicable to any dynamically generated content. As long as you can convert it into a string, you can serve it from your controller methods, you only need to make sure that you set the Content-type header of the response to the right mime type for the content you are serving. This is done with via the content_type argument to the expose decorator of the controller method. For generic binary content, you can use the mime type "application/octet-stream", which in most cases will cause browsers to open a download dialog when the user requests your file.