Generate and download a text file in javascript
- by Mark B
All my research so far suggests this can't be done, but I'm hoping someone here has some cunning ideas.
I have a form on a website which allows users to bulk upload lots of URLs to add to a list on the server. There's quite a lot of server-side processing to do on each URL, so to avoid timeouts and to display progress, I've implemented the upload using jQuery to submit the URLs one at a time using ajax.
This is all working nicely. However, part of the processing on each URL is deduplicating it against the complete list. The ajax call returns a status indicating either a successful upload or a rejection due to duplication. As the upload progresses, I tell the user how many URLs have been rejected as duplicates (along with overall progress and ETA).
The problem now is how to give the user a complete list of the failed duplicate URLs. I've kept them in an array in my jQuery, and would like the user to be able to click on a link on the form to download a text file containing those URLs. Is this possible just using client-side processing?
The server-side processing basically handles a single keyword at a time. I'd rather not have to store the duplicates in a database table with some kind of session key which gets sent with every ajax call, and is then used at the end to generate the text file server-side (and then gets cleaned up some time later). I can see how to do this, but it seems very clunky and a bit 20th century.
