Issues hosting CSV in Design Studio

[Josh_Roten]

I would like to provide users a CSV download upon form submission. I have accomplished this by creating a download link on the confirmation page. When I first host the CSV in design studio and enter the CSV url path in the hef, it works as intended. Someone clicks the download button and the CSV downloads.

At some point this breaks. Instead of downloading the CSV, it renders the content: https://connect.bizjournals.com/rs/673-UWY-229/images/Influencers_Law.csv

Can some one please tell me how to effectively host a CSV for download in Marketo, without the unwanted conversion?

Thank you,

Josh

[JD_Nelson]

can you post a bit more on how you're embedding it? It might have to do with the marketo tokens being added, or possibly the usage of 'html://' in your email string -- please post a screenshot to illustrate a bit better?

[Josh_Roten]

Thanks JD! Here is my HTML:

<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; color: #333333;" mce-data-marked="1">Thank you! <strong><span style="color: #333399;"><a href="https://connect.bizjournals.com/rs/673-UWY-229/images/Influencers_Law.csv" target="_blank" id="" style="color: #333399;">Your download is ready</a></span></strong>.</span></div>

[SanfordWhiteman]

Can some one please tell me how to effectively host a CSV for download in Marketo, without the unwanted conversion?

It's not "conversion" really, it's the opposite: it's a text file, served as the text/plain MIME type , You're running into a longtime problem with hosting downloadable content on Marketo: Design Studio assets are not forced into downloadable mode using the Content-Disposition header. So if the browser can open the file natively (true for text files and PDFs, for example, but not Word docs) it will just open in the browser.

It's for this reason that we advise gatewaying Marketo assets through a mini-CDN -- we have an Amazon CloudFront distro that adds the Content-Disposition header and otherwise just passes through the request, so it doesn't need any other config.

[Josh_Roten]

Thank you Sanford for the additional information.

To make sure I understand, there is currently no way in Marketo (without using a content delivery network) to host a CSV in Design Studio and then provide a download link of that content using similar code below in an email?

<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: 16px; color: #333333;" mce-data-marked="1">Thank you! <strong><span style="color: #333399;"><a href="https://connect.bizjournals.com/rs/673-UWY-229/images/Influencers_Law.csv" target="_blank" id="" style="color: #333399;">Your download is ready</a></span></strong>.</span></div>

Thanks again for your time/help

[SanfordWhiteman]

No, it's not about the link, it's about the way the response is sent.

Truth is you should be using a redirect page instead of linking directly to the downloadable anyway, for reasons explained here: https://blog.teknkl.com/stop-using-direct-download-links-unless-you-like-losing-tracking/

But even with the redirect page you'll have the same prob after the redirect.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I should add that you can attempt to use the "download" attribute on your <a> tags, but it's not supported in all browsers and stripped out by mail clients, so I don't consider it a solution.