Question

I’m trying to download file from FTP using javascript, for which I created the following topic:

Is it possible to download file from FTP using Javascript?

From there I learned that I can use window.open('ftp://xyz.org/file.zip'); to download the file. It opens a browser new window, but the window closes immediately.

How I can I force it to stay open?

Actually I do all these in Silverlight application:

Here is the code:

HtmlPage.Window.Eval("window.open('" + url+ "', 'Download', 'height=500,width=800,top=10,left=10');");

I also tried this,

string targetFeatures = "height=500,width=800,top=10,left=10";
HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri(url), "_blank", targetFeatures);

But both results in same : it opens a window, and closes it immediately. I see it just for fraction of second!

Answer 1

I know this doesn’t answer your question, and I’m sure you know all of this. I’m answering more because I don’t see this point brought up often. 🙂

Silverlight has very limited support for client interactions. Javascript is a shim that in my opinion gets overused to try and bypass things that Silverlight was architectured against. It would have been very easy for Microsoft to include FTP support in Silverlight but it was excluded for a reason.

However, Silverlight has great support for webservice interactions. So the recommended way of getting a file would be to call a webservice that would do the FTP transfer for you and then send the contents down to the Silverlight application via the webservice. Possibly even processing it on the webservice side for any business logic etc.

Like I said, I suspect your requirement is to not use a webservice (to pass the bandwith cost onto the user most likely). But it’d be interesting to know more about your business problem instead of your technical problem for the solution you’ve chosen.