从AJAX调用时，下载文件功能不起作用？

Question

This might be a bad question, because it's possible the issue is to something else in my project, but I was hoping that changing the header from an AJAX call may be an issue someone is familiar with. The below PHP function executes fine when called synchronously, but does not download anything and returns a 200 error when I call it from AJAX.

  public function download_csv() {

    $csv = 'hello, header';
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="format.csv"');
    header('Content-Type: text/plain');
    header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($csv));
    header('Connection: close');


    echo $csv;
  }

Answer 1

In my knowledge you cannot download a file using ajax (security reasons).
I googled a bit again, and it seems that this is the point.

A working solution could be using an iframe that is not visible to the user, and setting its 'src' attribute to the download url when you need to download the file.

You can also check this answer here that uses a jquery plugin and looks promising (haven't tried it myself)