Question

I have a process that sends a PDF to the user via

Response.BinaryWrite(pdf);

After this completes, I want to

Response.Redirect("Default.aspx");

The problem is that the redirect fires before the BinaryWrite() has completed. I know this because I do not see the popup to download the PDF as I should.

If I remove

Response.Redirect("Default.aspx");

Then I get the popup as I should. So, there’s a race condition here (probably has something to do with HTTP being connectionless). I could do

Thread.Sleep(5000);

But that is ridiculous. Is there a good solution to this problem?

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I tried AJAX. This isn’t working either. Due to an issue with AJAX and popups, I have to use the workaround

window.frames["#pdfPopup"].location.reload();

To get my popup to display.

Then this code never runs…

alert('before href');//no alert ever displays
window.location.href = "http://www.yahoo.com/";

This could be because I called reload(). Any ideas?

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I hooked into onload for the frame, but this still doesnt work! Ugh. I read that onload does not fire for frames that contain activeX controls, including PDF. I read this on SO and multiple google sites.

<iframe id="pdfPopup" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;" onload="Redirect();"></iframe>

onload does fire on page load, but not when I call reload and put a PDF in there. So I have hit a brick wall. Anybody have any solutions for this?

Answer 1

Instead of using document.href open the pop-up window through window.open on client side and pass the URL to download the PDF there. Then you can perform the redirect

window.open("PDFService.aspx?param1=...");
document.location.href = "Default.aspx";