Sometimes our Excel VBA applications need to interact with websites. Downloading a file through a URL is a typical example. In this lesson you can learn how to do that using XMLHttpRequest and ADODB.Stream object. XMLHttp is used to request the data from the web server. Once we receive the data from the server, the ADODB.Stream object is used to write that data to a file. You can use this method to download file types such as image files, csv files etc.
So let’s start writing our macro to download a file using the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Let’s name our Sub procedure as “DownloadFileFromURL”
End Sub
First we need to declare a few variables.
Dim objXmlHttpReq As Object
Dim objStream As Object
Next assign the URL of the file to the FileUrl variables
For an example if your file URL is https://www.example.com/images/chart.jpg then you can assign it to the variable as follows.
Next step is to create a XMLHttp object to request the data from the server.
Call the open method followed by the send method.
objXmlHttpReq.send
Then check the status. If it equals 200 (OK), we can move to the next step.
Now we need to create an ADODB.Stream object to write the data(received) to a file.
Stream in programming means flow of data. In programming data is what flows between processors and input or output devices. Check this link to see all the Properties, Methods and Events of Stream object.
Stream Object Properties, Methods, and Events
But we need to use only a few of them here.
objStream.Type = 1
objStream.Write objXmlHttpReq.responseBody
objStream.SaveToFile ThisWorkbook.Path & "\" & "file.jpg", 2
objStream.Close
In the SaveToFile method I have entered 2 as SaveOptions. So the program will overwrite the file with the data from the stream if the file already exists. If you don’t want to overwrite the existing file then replace it with 1.
Below is the full code which you can use to download a file through a URL.
Dim FileUrl As String
Dim objXmlHttpReq As Object
Dim objStream As Object
FileUrl = "URL of your file"
'example
'FileUrl = "https://www.example.com/images/chart.jpg"
Set objXmlHttpReq = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
objXmlHttpReq.Open "GET", FileUrl, False, "username", "password"
objXmlHttpReq.send
If objXmlHttpReq.Status = 200 Then
Set objStream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
objStream.Open
objStream.Type = 1
objStream.Write objXmlHttpReq.responseBody
objStream.SaveToFile ThisWorkbook.Path & "\" & "file.jpg", 2
objStream.Close
End If
End Sub
In the above example I showed how to download a .jpg file. But you can use this method to download other file types as well. Remember to change the file extension depending on the type of the file you download. For example if you are downloading a CSV file then the SaveToFile method should be changed as follows.
