This solution is perfect! Works great with Spring MVC and a JSP. Thank you!

Nice, thank you very much, but doesn't work on ie6 for me.. IE8, FF, opera, chrome are good, but old ie6 not :-(

All is OK now.
I applied your demo program to my java program. So I set header, cookie...
You have response.Flush();
I was sending the file using OutputStream, so I didn't do this step. But it wasn't function in IE6.
So I tried response.flushBuffer(); in java and finally it works.
Thanks for great demo program Jesse ;-)

Hi Pietro,

Glad that you are able to do it for java, can you pl share that code for java. Thanks

yuva

Can this be achieved without the use of JQuery?

This was a huge help! Thank you so much!

Thank you for this very elegant solution!

However you reference a question from eFreedom which is wrong: this site only plagiarize stackoverflow.com and messes all search engines results. As indicated on eFreedom, this question is copied from
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3055138/can-you-use-javascript-to-detect-a-file-download-window-created-server-side

p.s. : the comment form does not accept my email address since it has a “+” in it :(

You rock! One other cool thing is that the cookie is available in ALL browser windows referencing the same domain/path, so you can monitor the presence of the cookie in the "main" window, but load the d/l into a separate window (which could be nice depending on your needs).

This is a very nice solution. I was searching for this for some time until I found it. BTW, I am also using jQuery and blockUI on the client side, the server side is spring MVC. Thanks for sharing this with everybody.

This is beautiful, thanks!

You beauty! Simple and elegant solution. Thanks so much.

very nice,hope this can help me.thanks for your great work,man.

can i add you on facebook:

my is : ZhongHui Duan

This is great code - thank you!

For the php users out there, the php equivalent of

AppendCookie(new HttpCookie("fileDownloadToken", downloadTokenValue);

in php is:

setcookie ("fileDownloadToken", $downloadTokenValue);

CJA

What a great idea. This worked out perfectly for what I wanted to do. Thanks for sharing this technique.

Thanks... this was a great post... i have been struggling for this sort of solution. Thanks a lot for sharing.

for those who are facing issue in reading cookie...

Set cookie.HttpOnly = false

Hi, I just come across your post, it's brilliant.
Until now I've been using the window.onblur event to detect when the download dialog appears and hide the "please wait" div. I works fine provided the user don't decide to read an email during the wait.
I will definitely try your solution, thanks!

Perfect solution. Adapted it to Java w/out any issues.

Works Perfect. Thanks a lot

I have a ajaxForm , when the user submits the page it hits the sever url and necessary page gets generated. But with the example that you have shown here how do I open a pop up window for the incoming file to download.

Can you please provide an example how to achieve it.

My way of sending and opening popup is $('#reportForm').ajaxForm( {

dataType :'json',
type :'POST',
url : 'report/initialRequest.html',
beforeSubmit :validateSearchField,
ifModified : true,
success :function(data, textStatus, jqXHR){},
complete : function(jqXHR, textStatus) {
window.location.href = "report/initialRequest.html" + "?" + $('#reportForm').formSerialize();
$.unblockUI();
return false;
}
});

But in this case what happens its send in another request again and reprocess what it has done earlier.

Can you please help me on this?

What a brilliant hack. :) The only browser I was able to get working without this trick was IE9 using document.readyState. Doesn't work so much with Chrome/FireFox.

Nice one. I was looking for exactly this. Thanks very much.

That's awesome! Exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you very much for sharing this.

Hi, I'd like to have the Java-JSP translation if possible. I tried to translate but it's not working for me. Thank you.

You are my hero. I have been struggling with this issue for months! Thanks!

Brilliant! This is exactly what I needed. Thanks a bunch!

There seems to be a problem On safari for this solution. No cookie is written.

I'm in total debt to you. I've been trying to get a simple, minimal method of doing this forever! thanks!

i have a similar problem, in my case , i have a small zip file say of 400-500 bytes generated on air and passed on to browser for download which opens up download popup, by this time backend already had updated with file consumption from client, now delimma is when users clicks cancel,i wish to let backend rollback my changes, how can this be achieved. i am sick of this issue kindly help.

You saved my life... :-)

This solution works me fine in Chrome and FF, but I have a problem with IE9 (IE in general). When the response with the file comes it contains a set-cookie header with the proper value, but when I read the cookie with the jquery function it doesn't read the proper value (it reads the value of the cookie I set when I load the page to test that I'm readingg the cookie properly). It seems like the browser is not setting the cookie due to is a file download response, if i reload the page the cookie of the response is not set.

The server language is PHP, but the solution works fine in FF and Chrome.

Any idea?? Thanks in advance.

How to set cookie in asp application and how to read it in jquery?
I have set the cookie in asp like this Response.AddHeader "Set-Cookie", "fileDownloadToken=something;path = /;"

But Jquery is not reading this.

I am using IE 6.0.Please help me.

It works perfectly! Thanks for sharing this great gem!

Cheers,
Lee

How genius idea is!
Exactly what I was looking for!
Thank you so much. :D

the cookies was written to the client must be after file sending completely?

@phil - I don't think I understand your question. The cookies should be sent to the browser in the same HTTP Response that contains the "data" for the file to be downloaded. In this way the 'block UI' stuff should go away as soon as the file download dialog appears.

if the file not send completely(might be paused by the user).will the cookies be sent to the browser?

sorry I misunderstood this post, I thought this solution is used to detect whether file was already download.. but many thanks you share the very good idea.

A great post. You said the sample application is adapted from web form version. Can you post or email me the web form version. I have a project still in ASP.NET 2.0. A lot of efforts is required to migrate to MVC. Thanks!

man, you saved my life! i spent two freakin' days on this, and your solution works perfectly. thank you!

Thanks a lot!

Works great except in IE for PDF files. I was able to open the PDF files before applying this solution, however, after changing the code to the above solution, I am getting 'There was an error opening this document. This file cannot be found.'

Error only occurs in IE for PDF files. Does anyone have a clue?

You save my life! Thanks!!

One thing for sure..

YOU SAVED MY LIFE!!

a week of headache gone instantly once i found and adapt your concept to my code..

THANK YOU..

TERIMA KASIH

Wow!! good solution ...
But..... this will work only if cookie is enabled. Right?
what if it is an environment where cookies are not enabled?
will the data be passed as url encoded?

@stv

This solution will only work for browsers with cookies enabled.

You save my life hero
Thank you a lot
Great solution!

I have been seeking this code for a long time! Great Solution!
Thank you very much

This idea is good for many things!

What a great solution. Thanks.

This is a brilliant solution, thanks!

One issue with it though in the example solution is the timer keep's running/doing the comparison. So you keep calling the finishDownload() over and over which might not be desirable (in my case, on subsequent 'downloads' my submit button which I was disabling until the file was generated kept getting enabled straight away).

Easily solved by clearing the timer (I used http://stackoverflow.com/a/2133217).

:)

this solutions rocks. i use it with php. great!

Thanks! This is exactly what I was trying to do, but then didn't differently and now changed it to this better version.

Excellent ! Still useful these days !

This solution is perfect! Works great with JSP. Thanks a lot!

Great article. works perfectly in asp.mvc 3

Sorry, but it's doesn't work for me. I need to detect when a file finish download inside a IFRAME.
Always when I read the cookie with jquery, its value is NULL
This is my java code:

response.addCookie(new Cookie("tokenDocumentLoad", token));
response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
response.setHeader("Cache-Control","no-store");

response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=" + fileName + ".xls");
response.addHeader("Pragma", "public");
response.addHeader("Cache-Control", "max-age=0");
response.setDateHeader("Expires", (System.currentTimeMillis() + new Integer(getServletContext().getInitParameter("webAppResponseExpire")).intValue()));
ServletOutputStream servletOutputStream = response.getOutputStream();

fileContent....

servletOutputStream.flush();
servletOutputStream.close();
-------------------
This is the javascript code:

var cookieValue = $.cookie('tokenDocumentLoad');
alert("cookieValue:" + cookieValue);

Hi! Great post!
I had to add the 'name' attribute to the hidden field in order for this to work. Otherwise, the browser didn't send the parameter (maybe it had to do with the form issuing a GET request)
<input type="hidden" id="download_token_value_id" name="download_token_value_id"/>

Regards!

Your article helped me a lot. I appreciate your efforts.
Thank you very much.

thank you so much for this post - saved me a lot of time! This is the only solution that worked first time, every time! Used with PHP Yii.

may you live long and prosper!!

Thanks Jesse!

what if user has disabled the cookie.
Will this work

great post.

one little hitch that took a while to fix: I needed to set the path variable on the cookie to '/'. without this, the jQuery doesn't find the cookie because it is referenced to the path of the download link, rather than the path of the current page.

dunno if this makes sense or not... i found this only after a few hours of trial and error and I'm still learning some of the web protocol stuff by trial and (lots of) error.

Very elegant solution I love it. Thanks for the MVC3 example on Github, I do everything in MVC so it was easy to implement.

@Mark Blackwell and others
I ran into that as well. The thing to keep in mind is it might not always be / (root) dependent on the language you use to create the cookie. For .net HttpCookie defaults to root so you just need to send the null value to root
$.cookie('ExcelDownloadToken', null, { path: '/' });

It sounds like you got it working but figured it worth a mention for others since this is obviously the best solution for cookie enabled browser sessions.

Thanks so much for this post. It is genius and solves my exact issue.

This works great except for one thing. If the modal is displayed and the user hits the stop button or presses escape, this effectively cancels the download, and the modal never goes away. How can I get around that?

@Rusty D: That's a good point and a weakness of this approach. I'm not sure if there's a way that you could detect the fact that the user hit the stop button, though you might be able to detect whether or not they have hit 'esc'. If I have time I'll look into that and see if there might a workaround.

Hm... this looks not working with IE9. Anybody found a solution for it?

Thanks mate. I cant say how immensely your post helped me.

Please help me PHP guys. I setup a cookie in PHP and then try to read from client(jquery) but it just said something like "token = object object". Client read from with jqeury and setCookie in PHP... is this really working?

Thanks for this.But in IE8 it's not working perfectly.when the download popup comes , the loading state is not getting hidden.it is getting hidden only when i cancel or save the download.it works perfectly for all other browsers. plz help me here

Your a genius! Thanks so much for sharing this

Just echoing what many have already said - great solution, many thanks.

Thanks a lot! It's a really nice solution and it's exactly what I needed :)

Thanks a lot! Good solution.. Just one comment. Running my project with debug, that row $.cookie('fileDownloadToken', null); works great, but when project is published, that row isnt working as expected.. I replaced this previous row with $.removeCookie('fileDownloadToken'), and now all works great... Thanks again.

Thanks for this! I had the same problem as Valters. When you click the create file button a second time it wasn't working. Replacing the line $.cookie('fileDownloadToken', null); with $.removeCookie('fileDownloadToken') works fine for me now, no matter how many times I click create download! Thanks Valters!

Thank you very much for this! It's an elegant,classy solution. Just what we were looking for. I have it working with a ColdFusion site and it was easy to implement.

I just wanted to say thank you for this example - it helped me greatly. Thanks!

Bull's eye! I have been looking for a solution for exactly the same problem and my colleague stumbled upon this blog! Thank you!

Thank you so much. It saved my day.

Thanks, this is really useful. Works on WinForms 3.5 also.

I'm struggling to get this working in my implementation and wonder if anyone can see why.
The 'Please Wait' is displayed but the cookie is never matched and so the screen remains showing 'Please Wait' forever. I've tried returning a response from the Server side instead of 'void' but this never works either.

I've simplified the code as there's a lot of detail in the original but basically I generate an Excel file which contains an image and some data then download this (all of which works). All I'm missing is being able to clear the 'Please Wait'.

The user clicks on btnGraphExportToExcel to start things off.....

-----------
CLIENT SIDE
-----------

<div>
<br />

<span>Download What If</span>

</div>


function ExportGraph(){
var url = '@Url.Action("GraphExportToExcel", "ExcelHelper", new RouteValueDictionary(new { fileURL = "PARAM1", mstartDate = "PARAM2", mendDate = "PARAM3", period = "PARAM4" }))';
// These values are all defined elsewhere
url = url.replace("PARAM1", imageName);
url = url.replace("PARAM2", startDate);
url = url.replace("PARAM3", endDate);
url = url.replace("PARAM4", _display_period);
url = url.replace(/&amp;/g, "&");
myLink = url;

loadMyLink(imageName);
}

function loadMyLink(imageName) {
$.blockUI();
window.location.href = myLink;

fileDownloadCheckTimer = window.setInterval(function () {
var cookieValue = $.cookie('fileDownloadToken');
if (cookieValue == imageName) {
finishDownload();
}
}, 1000);
}

function finishDownload() {
window.clearInterval(fileDownloadCheckTimer);
$.cookie('fileDownloadToken', null);
$.unblockUI();
}

------------------------------------------------------------
SERVER SIDE (ExcelHelperController.cs -> GraphExportToExcel)
------------------------------------------------------------

public void GraphExportToExcel(string fileURL, string mstartDate, string mendDate, string period)
{
// Create a spreadsheet and populate it with the required data
// ALL THIS WORKS AS EXPECTED

// Provide the download dialog for the file
string folderPath = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ExcelFolderPath"] + "/" + Guid.NewGuid();
string serverExcelFilePath = Request.MapPath("~" + folderPath + "/");

string dateStamp = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss");
string excelPath = serverExcelFilePath + "ExcelHelper_" + dateStamp + ".xlsx";
MakeFileDownloadable(excelPath, fileURL);

// Delete the image from the server
DeleteImageFileFromServer(fileURL);

// Delete the Excel file from the server - THIS MUST BE DONE AFTER THE FILE HAS BEEN DOWNLOADED
DeleteExcelStore(folderPath);
}

private void MakeFileDownloadable(string fileName, string imageName)
{
Response.Clear();
// Add a cookie with the imageName in it so we know we've downloaded the file contain
Response.AppendCookie(new HttpCookie("fileDownloadToken", imageName));

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
string fullFileName = fileName.Substring(fileName.LastIndexOf('\\') + 1);
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + fullFileName);

using (FileStream sourceFile = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open))
{
long FileSize = sourceFile.Length;
byte[] getContent = new byte[(int)FileSize];
sourceFile.Read(getContent, 0, getContent.Length);

using (Stream outputStream = Response.OutputStream)
{
outputStream.Write(getContent, 0, getContent.Length);
}
}
Response.Flush();
Response.End();
}

Great solution! Thank you! but what happens if the cookies are disabled on the client's browser?

It works fine. I had a problem in IE with my spring mvc application because I didn't set the path of the cookie and it is set by default to the current document location. In the call to the method who exports the file the document location has changed and the read of the cookie returns undefined ( $.cookie("fileDownloadToken"); ) . I solve this problem setting the root path in the cookie before add it to the response header ( cookie.setPath("/"); )

Works Awesome! All I needed was the jquery "polling" part and adapted the rest to my page.
I actually call an iFrame and in the C# if(!postback) set a cookie called "isLoading" = true; and start the jquery looping/checking code.
All the jquery does is check to see if the cookie= false.
Then I purposely do a postback and in the response set the isLoading cookie to "false";

When jquery sees false, continue with whatever javascript I need to do! (Like redirect, or load a popup etc etc.)

Thanks!

Thank you

Great solution! Thanks so much for posting this.

Exctly what I was looking for.
Good job!+

Thank you so much Buddy !!! You just nailed it out. I was scratching my head all the day for this...

Please let me know how to create the value in java for 'downloadTokenValue' before adding it to the cookie?

Thank u so much ..its really helpful for me

works like a charm, many thanks for your work on this

Fantastic!!! Works Great!!! For a week I was searching in vain until I found your solution. Thank you so much!

Thx ~~ you're solution is good~!

Great! thank you!

Thanks !
And to complete Marcos Casal's post, when you set cookie's path to '/', you have to pass the root path too when you delete it :
$.removeCookie('fileDownloadToken', { path: '/' });

I am using a web browser control to access pages of a URL. I am able to move programmatically through the pages. At the last page, the Invoke.Click is used to simulate clicking the 'Export to Excel' button on the webpage. I get the File Download window which is okay for now....the issue is, how do I detect that the window is there so that I can execute code to interact with it? I'm using Visual Studio 2013 (VB.Net). The framework is 3.5 and I am using IE11. I've been plugging away at this for a couple of weeks. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You can delete file before send it

string fileName = 'some_builder_file()';
string filepath = Server.MapPath("~/Content/archives/") + fileName;

var FileBytes = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(filepath);

System.IO.File.Delete(filepath);

return File(FileBytes, "application/vnd.xls", fileName);

Without using cookie is there any way to detect file download dialog box either in javascript ot jquery

This solution doesn't seem to work for me. I've set download token cookies on the server side. But when i check on client side, the cookie is always empty. Probably, page is not getting refreshed for download request, not sure.