ok, with dave's prompting and help, i got the code to work. i don't understand why taking the response.write() function out there works. how come?
here is my working snippet: from cStringIO import StringIO stream = StringIO() if (file_return == 'xml'): from gluon.serializers import xml stream.write(xml(dct)) response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/xml; charset=us-ascii' response.headers['Content-disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=hsDNA_%s_IQa.xml' % (qry[0][1]) return stream.getvalue() else: stream.write(r"%s" % dct) response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain; charset=us-ascii' response.headers['Content-disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=hsDNA_%s_IQa.py' % (qry[0][1]) return stream.getvalue() i got rid of the csv option and just went with xml and python. both are working great. thanx dave, lucas -- Resources: - http://web2py.com - http://web2py.com/book (Documentation) - http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code) - https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues) --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to web2py+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.