This solution works on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE11 and Edge. This blob object can be use to create an objectURL, which can then be used as href in a link.

After that, you can call a redirect link for downloading the file, because this is a temp file, so you should need to delete it after download. If you want to do that, you need to create and save the file in server and return its path to Ajax. In essence the Fetch API fetch() method returns a response, from which a blob can be created. Introduction When you use the Ajax call in ASP.NET MVC, you can just return a JSON object but not a file. To solve this it was necessary to download the file to memory with an XHR request and then get the browser to open or download it with whatever plugin/UI it normally uses for pdf file.įor the XHR request we use the Fetch API with the whatwg-fetch polyfill. In this case however the API was designed for native mobile apps and required the presence of a custom ‘api-key’ http-header, which made it impossible to just provide the url to the browser. Normally, the API would provide a json-object with a link to the pdf, which can then be used to open a new browser tab/window and the browser or platform takes care of the rest. On my most recent assignment I was faced with the challenge of downloading a pdf file from an API and displaying it in the browser.

How to get pdf file via ajax call