如何使用AJAX请求返回文件

Question

I use the following ajax call to send some data over to a PHP page, which generates an excel file. If I run the PHP page by itself with fake data already ascribed to an array, it downloads the file, but if I try to run the php page through the ajax button, nothing downloads. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I'm getting a 500 Internal Server Error as the php tries to send back the file. See below:

Request Headers:

POST /XLS.php HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 15
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
Accept: */*
Origin: http://127.0.0.1
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/multiLine.php
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,fr-FR;q=0.6,fr;q=0.4
Cookie: PHPSESSID=rd44cluc503datf36616b9e5b5; popupPartNumber=null

Response Headers:

HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 18:21:55 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.10 (Win32) OpenSSL/1.0.1i PHP/5.5.15
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.15
Content-disposition: attachment; filename="multiLine report 03.13.15 - .xlsx"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Cache-Control: must-revalidate
Pragma: public
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet

the ajax I'm using is:

$.ajax({
  url: "XLS.php", 
  type: "post",
  data: {xl: xl},
  }); //closes ajax call

and I've gone through about 7 different contenttype: options to see if one of those made the difference, but none of them did.

How do I get this file back?

Answer 1

If you're look to download a file using an ajax request you have two possibilities.

Fake it by redirecting the user to the download page and

As skidadon pointedin comment instead of using POST parameter use GET parameter

 window.location = 'XLS.php?x1='+x1;

Or use the jquery.fileDownload library who perform an Ajax-like file download experience

https://github.com/johnculviner/jquery.fileDownload