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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T02:40:14+00:00

I’m having a problem similar to jQuery $.ajax Not Working in IE8 but it

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I’m having a problem similar to jQuery $.ajax Not Working in IE8 but it works on FireFox & Chrome, but with a different use case.

I’m using the jQuery Form plug-in to handle a file upload to an ASP.NET MVC controller, which sends the file off for parsing and processing. If an Exception is thrown, it should alert the user to the issue.

//client side code
//make an ajax call, sending the contents of the file
                    $("#ajaxUploadForm").ajaxSubmit({
                        dataType: 'json',
                        url: '/plan/Something/ExcelImport',
                        iframe: true,
                        beforeSend: function () {
                            $(".ui-dialog-buttonpane").find("#my_progress").fadeIn();
                        },
                        success: function (data, textStatus) {
                            output = "<center><span class='flash'>" + data.message + "</span></center>";
                            $("#flash_message").html(output).fadeIn('slow');
                            setTimeout(function () { $("#flash_message").fadeOut() }, 5000);
                            cleanup();
                        },
                        error: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                            alert("XMLHttpRequest is " + XMLHttpRequest);
                            var contents = "";
                            for (prop in XMLHttpRequest) {
                                contents += "\na property is " + prop + " it's value is " + XMLHttpRequest[prop];
                            }
                            alert("the contents are " + contents);
                            alert("textStatus is " + textStatus);
                            alert("errorThrown is " + errorThrown);
                            //comes back in an HTML envelope. This should be parsed with regex, but I can't get it to work. Dirty hack
                            response = XMLHttpRequest.responseText.substring(XMLHttpRequest.responseText.indexOf("<body>"));
                            response = response.replace("<body>", "");
                            response = response.replace("</body>", "");
                            alert("There was a problem with the upload.\r\n" + response);
                        },
                        complete: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus) {
                            $(".ui-dialog-buttonpane").find("#my_progress").remove();
                            something_import.dialog('close');
                            something_import.dialog('destroy');
                        }
                    });

//server side code
public FileUploadJsonResult ExcelImport()
    {
        FileUploadJsonResult result = new FileUploadJsonResult();
        HttpPostedFileBase hpf = Request.Files[0] as HttpPostedFileBase;
        if (hpf.ContentLength == 0)
            return new FileUploadJsonResult { Data = new { message = "File contained no data" } };
        String fileName = Path.GetFileName(hpf.FileName);
        String timeStampedFile = fileName.Insert(fileName.IndexOf('.'),"_"+DateTime.Now.ToFileTimeUtc());
        string savedFileName = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory + "tempo", timeStampedFile);
        hpf.SaveAs(savedFileName);
        try
        {
            result = ProcessFile(savedFileName, Request["Id"]) as FileUploadJsonResult;
        }
        catch (ArgumentException e)
        {
            this.Response.StatusCode = 500;
            this.Response.StatusDescription = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.BadRequest.ToString();
            Response.Write(e.Message);
            result = Json(new { message = e.Message, stackTrace = e.StackTrace }) as FileUploadJsonResult;  
        }
        return result;
    }

This works perfectly in Chrome and Firefox. In IE, the XMLHttpRequest object coming back is different:

FF:alt text

IE:
alt text

I’ve been Googling around for differences between the browser implementations of XMLHttpRequest, but haven’t found anything that deals specifically with this case. Stymied.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The reason this is happening is because of the iframe fallback strategy that ajaxSubmit employs. I think since the response gets posted into the iframe IE tries to figure out how to dipslay it and decides that it wants to ask you to download the response instead of just putting it in the iframe.

    I came across this same situation a while ago and found an article (that I can’t find now) that offered a workaround.

    If you surround your json response in a textarea nobody is going to complain(IE,FF,Chrome,probably Safari) and you’ll get your response parsed correctly.

    E.g. if you are returning

    {Id: 1, Name: 'Me'}

    just return:

    <textarea>{Id: 1, Name: 'Me'}</textarea>

    You see now IE thinks it’s html so it inserts it into the hidden iframe. Your ajaxSubmit function still gets called and parses the json correctly and then everybody’s happy. 🙂

    If you’re using ASP.NET MVC you could shamelessly copy this extension method 🙂

    public static class ControllerExtensions
{
    public static ActionResult JsonSafe(this IController controller, object obj)
    {
        JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
        return new WriteResult(string.Format("<textarea>{0}</textarea>", serializer.Serialize(obj)));
    }
}
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