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Asked: 2026-05-11T07:23:42+00:00

Application requests KML data through AJAX from server. This data is stored in javascript

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Application requests KML data through AJAX from server. This data is stored in javascript variables, and displayed in Google Earth plugin.

In javascript, how do I provide a link to download the KML data stored in javascript variable (as a string) without requiring a request back to server?

This link: http://forum.mootools.net/viewtopic.php?id=9728

suggests the use of data URI, but that probably won’t work across enough browsers for my needs. Probably simplest just to go back to server to get data again for download, but curious if anyone has pulled this off with javascript.

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  1. Short answer: you can’t and still be platform independent. Most browsers just don’t allow javascript to manipulate the filesystem.

    That said, you might be able to get away with some very platform-specific hacks. For example, IE offers the execCommand function, which you could use to call SaveAs. If you did that within an IFrame that had the data you wanted to save, you might get it working — but only on IE. Other options (again, I’m going Microsoft specific here) include this Silverlight hack, or ActiveX controls.

    I think for full platform compatibility, you’re just going to have to suck it up and provide a server-side download option.

    [Edit] Whoops! I didn’t do enough due diligence when I went link-hunting. It turns out the Silverlight hack I linked to has a server-side component. Looks like you’re pretty SOL.

    [Edit2] I found a nice summary of browser compatibility for execCommand here. Although it lists question marks for the ‘saveas’ command, maybe that might be a good route for you after all. Worth a try, perhaps?

    [Edit3] Well, I decided to do a proof of concept of the approach I suggested, and I got something fairly simple working in IE. Unfortunately, I proved in the process that this approach will not work for Firefox and doesn’t appear to work in Chrome/Safari, either. So it’s very platform dependent. But it works! Here’s a complete working page:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN'   'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd'> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' > <head>     <title>Javascript File Saver</title>     <script type='text/javascript'>       function PageLoad() {         var fdoc = window.frames['Frame'].document;         fdoc.body.appendChild(fdoc.createTextNode('foo,bar,baz'));       }       function Save() {         var fdoc = window.frames['Frame'].document;         fdoc.execCommand('SaveAs', true);       }     </script> </head> <body onload='PageLoad();'> <h2>Javascript File Saver</h2> <iframe id='Frame' style='width: 400px;'>Noframe</iframe><br /> <button onclick='Save();'>Save</button> </body> </html>
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