json xhr response opens a download file popup window

Question

Hi

For one of our ajax request (with a .json response) some of our clients have complained that they are seeing a "File Download" prompt asking the user to download the .json response. I am baffled because considering that this is an xhr response, this should never happen. Has anyone seen this?

Thanks

Answer 1

try specifying a MIME type of "text/plain" in the response. or just drop the ".json" extension from the url (try .txt, or .js, for instance)

Answer 2

Hmm. But this is an ajax respone. Why would it open a "Download Box" for an ajax response.

Answer 3

Drop the .json and set the content type as text/html. IE doesn't know what type of file you are sending it, so it offers to download. It knows what to do with text/html :)

Answer 4

Hi,

Not sure if you found a solution, but I had a similar problem where IE tried to download any JS responses. To fix it, I had to ensure that format.html appears above format.js in the response block:

def index

  # ...

  respond_to do |format|
    # html must be above js, otherwise IE will try to download the JS
    format.html
    format.js
  end
end

Hope this helps.