Downloading a file from a server is trivial and so is the implantation of it using httpservletresponse. But after fighting with for a long time I finally came across this jQuery plugin. This works well as long as we make HTTP request using GET or POST to server and the server responds with a file to download.

How to use this

For this you need to download the plugin and include the file-

<script type="text/javascript" src="path-to-js-file.js"></script>  

The plugin accepts 3 arguments for url, data, and method. You can pass data to these arguments just as you would to jQuery's $.post or $.get functions, and assuming the server has no problems handling the request, the front end will respond with a prompt for a file download and the user never needs to leave the page. Here's an example call to the plugin:

// the second argument can't be left blank, so if you don't need it, you can write anything
$.download('get', 'file=file', 'get');  

and you're done!

Of course, if the server doesn't send the correct response, it wouldn't work. These are the list of headers that I used for the response sent from the server.

// get your file as InputStream
InputStream is = ...;  
// copy it to response's OutputStream
IOUtils.copy(is, response.getOutputStream());  

// set headers
response.setContentType("application/pdf");  // Your content type  
response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=somefile.pdf");