I am currently working on a website that interacts with a webservice using JavaScript to handle JSON requests. I make these requests via XMLHttpRequest and sometimes the service responds with a download request:
Example:
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="somefile.txt"
Content-Type: application/force-download
Content-Length: 3
123
If the document.location is set to a URL that provides a response like the one above, the browser will automatically prompt the user to download a file.
My question is: Is there a way to achieve the same file download effect with XMLHttpResponse objects? Perhaps through an iframe trick or another method? Unfortunately, XMLHttpRequest objects do not have a target member like HTML forms, so redirecting the full response (including headers) to a new page or hidden iframe seems tricky. Any ideas?