How To Download File Using Javascript Ajax

Using ajax to download files is not considered to be a good idea.

How to download file using javascript ajax. Javascript enabling is required. Instead window location or document location should be used. Downloading files from ajax post requests occasionally i stumble upon the need to download files from post requests. It doesn t need php. After that you can call a redirect link for downloading the file because this is a temp file so you should need to delete it after download.

An example would be generating pdf files where the pdf content is dependent on the request. If you want to do that you need to create and save the file in server and return its path to ajax. In this article we are going to show you a couple of tricks to generate and download directly a file using pure javascript. In such cases when we need to use ajax to make a http post and then download a file the solution is to use a 2 pronged approach where we would first make the http post request and in the controller action we would store the file content in a memory stream. It is easier to send ajax requests using javascript libraries or frameworks.

But it is also good to know how to send ajax request with plain javascript. In this tutorial i show how you can send get and post ajax requests with javascript and handle the request with php. When you use the ajax call in asp net mvc you just can return a json object but not a file if you want to do that you need to create and save the file in server and return it s path to ajax after that you can call a redirect link for download the file because this is a temp file so you should need to delete it after download. When the link is clicked the browser detects that it is a file and allows the user to download it. Therefore the automatic download of file has been difficult to achieve in the latest years but now with the introduction of html5 this task has become easier to achieve.

Currently most of the web applications show a normal link a href http download link for the users to download a file. Ajax file download with progress bar in pure javascript.