Download File Using Javascript/jQuery

Question

I have a very similar requirement specified here.

I need to have the user\'s browser start a download manually when $(\'a#someID\').click();

But

Answer 1

I have had good results with using a FORM tag since it works everywhere and you don't have to create temporarily files on server. The method works like this.

On the client side (page HTML) you create an invisible form like this

Then you add this Javascript code to your button:

$('#button').click(function() {
     $('#csv').val('---your data---');
     $('#downloadForm').submit();
}

The on the server-side you have the following PHP code in download.php:

You can even create zip files of your data like this:

open($file, ZipArchive::OVERWRITE);
$zip->addFromString('test.csv', $_REQUEST['data']);
$zip->close();

header('Content-Type: application/zip');
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file));
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="file.zip"');
readfile($file);
unlink($file); 

The best part is it does not leave any residual files on your server since everything is created and destroyed on the fly!