Question

All,

I have an HTML page that contains a form.

When the user completes the form and clicks “Submit” – the form posts the user’s inputs to a PHP page.

That PHP page processes the inputs and returns the user’s results as an attachment.

So far – everything works OK – the user clicks “Submit”, the browser’s progress bar starts to “spin”, and after a few seconds, the attachment is downloaded.

However, in the browser – the user is still on the form page. That’s OK with me.

So – here’s my question. Ideally, when the user clicks “Submit” – I would like to update the form page to indicate that the “process” is in progress. E.g.,

• disable the submit button to prevent redundant clicks
• display a “downloading” message and a “spinner”-type graphic

Then, when the download is complete – I’d like to capture that event so that I could re-enable the submit button and remove the downloading message.

Is this possible?

Or – is my initial set-up just wrong? Is there a better way to do this? (That is – have a form that calls a PHP page, have the PHP page return an attachment, and then return control to the calling page?)

Thanks in advance for your advice and insight!

Answer 1

Use javascript to open up the download in a new window. So don’t return the download in the POST request, simply let the page reload and put some javascript on the page that will open up a new window that will call your PHP script that will download the file.