The user fills in a form to download a file. The form results load in a new window (target="blank"). The MVC Controller Action returns a FileResult on success or my "SelfClosingPage" view on failure.
The goal behind this is to have the user download the file in a new page, and if any errors occur, the original calling page's url doesn't change (to the /DownloadFile url) and the user remains on the form page, instead of being directed to an error page.
This all works great, except I need to know when the file download is complete because I'd like to 1) hide the "File is downloading, please be patient" message if the download is successful 2) show an error message if the file download failed.
I was using a Cookie to do this and a JS interval to regularly check the cookies value. It either never worked or doesn't work any more (I can never get the cookie to show up on the original page).
Please advice. I can't use C# code in my JS because well, it wouldn't work since it executes once when the page is loaded and I'm trying to decouple the JS from the C# code.
I think my only solution is to do ajax javascript callbacks, but I'd like to avoid that.
UPDATE:
Found these related SO links that use the same approach I was trying to use.
MVC3 - File Download - Wait Status indicator
Detect when browser receives file download
Update 2
It's working again. I think the cookies expiry date was not long enough (though it should have been). I just changed it from 10 min (a file download should not take longer than that) to half a day.
