ajax filedownload,html - Ajax File download Issue - Stack Overflow

You can use a flash download manager - google will reveal a slew of them.

Your other option is to use real AJAX. Simply make a request to the download URI, and when you get your response, use the responseBody instead of the responseText attribute of the XMLHTTPRequest object.

You'll need a way to write that to the harddrive, which can be done in IE with lax security constraints and the ActiveXObject "Scripting.FileSystemObject" You might be able to use the data uri approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme with a base64 encoding, but I'm not sure if that will work.

Otherwise you're back to flash to write the data you downloaded via ajax to disk.

If you know the size of the dynamic download and exact timing isn't required in the specification, then you could do an internet speed check before the download, add some buffer time to the calculated time it will take to download the file, and just show the dialog box for that given period of time. Very hackish, but then again this scheme seems a little marketing-requires-it-to-be-so-it-shall-be