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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T19:49:01+00:00

I’m currently working on a project where a user will select a bunch of

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I’m currently working on a project where a user will select a bunch of options, hit submit and then the page that handles the submission will create a bunch of comma-delimited files, zip them up and send them back to the client.

I have most of this working just fine except for one part. The page where the user selects a bunch of options then calls via form submission an ASP page that handles all the file creation stuff. When the user hits submit, I show a progress bar so they know the page is working.

The problem I’m running into is that if I put a Response.Redirect at the end of my script, the file doesn’t get sent to the browser. If I don’t put a Response.Redirect at the end of the script, the calling page doesn’t get reloaded and just sits there like its still working.

I’ve tried doing this with jQuery and AJAX but that doesn’t work either.

Some code…

The criteria selection page

<form method="post" action="../../scripts/generate-presentation-data.asp" onsubmit="return submitform();">
...form items...
</form>

<script>
function submitform()
{
if ( confirm('Generate presentation data?') )
{ return true; }
else { return false; }
}
</script>

And the called page:

Response.Buffer = True

...create files, zip them up etc...

Response.AddHeader "Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=" & Chr(34) & "board-presentation-data.zip" & Chr(34)
Set objStream = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
objStream.Open
objStream.Type = 1
objStream.LoadFromFile(sFilePath & "board-presentation-data.zip")
Response.BinaryWrite(objStream.Read)

If I put a redirect at the end of this, the file never gets sent to the browser.

Any ideas how I can get something like this to work properly?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are asking your ASP code to have 2 responses one being the zip file the other being a redirect instruction. A request can only have one response either a redirect instruction or the zip file.

    Approach 1

    Store the generated zip file in a special sub folder in your web. Create a further sub folder using a random GUID and place the generated Zip file there. Do not attempt to send the Zip file in the response but simply to your redirect.

    In the url you redirect to you would encode into its query string the URL of the created zip file.

    The redirected page would generate in its HTML a link asking the user to click here to download the Zip. The url of the link would be the URL of zip file. You might try using Javascript to navigate to the file in the Load event or use a refresh META tag or other tricks to get the file to download automatically but you will need a fallback if these appoaches fail.

    Approach 2

    Use AJAX to post data to a page that returns a URL that a Zip file can be fetched from. This page either stores the posted data in the session or generates the zip file as above. The returned URL will either be a url to page that will generate the zip from the data stored in the sesssion or the URL to the zip itself.

    Once the post has returned code in the page can then open the return URL in a new window and then it can navigate itself to whatever final URL is desired.

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