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. In this article we are going to show you a couple of tricks to generate and download directly a file using pure javascript. It is easier to send ajax requests using javascript libraries or frameworks. Use the xmlhttprequest object to communicate with the server. Instead window location or document location should be used. Ajax file download with progress bar in pure javascript.

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. 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. If you want to do that you need to create and save the file in server and return its path to ajax. But it is also good to know how to send ajax request with plain javascript. An example would be generating pdf files where the pdf content is dependent on the request.

When you use the ajax call in asp net mvc you can just return a json object but not a file. When the link is clicked the browser detects that it is a file and allows the user to download it. In this tutorial i show how you can send get and post ajax requests with javascript and handle the request with php. It helps show the content of the site and redirects the user after a few seconds. Currently most of the web applications show a normal link a href http download link for the users to download a file.

Javascript enabling is required. 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.