JSP: How to close browser window after flushing a file to the browser?

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1

I have this simple JSP, which flushes a String to the browser as a file (message.txt). The JSP gets opened in a new window when the user clicks a link.

The problem is that after the JSP has run, the browser window won’t close automatically. I’ve tried adding a small javascript to achieve this, but i doesn’t seem to even get run.

How can I close the browser window after the JSP has run?


<%
 String someText = "bla bla bla";
 
 // Flush to browser 
 response.setContentType("text/plain");
 response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=message.txt");

 try {
  ServletOutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
  os.write(someText.getBytes());
  os.flush();
  os.close();
 } catch (IOException e) {
  return;
 } catch (Exception e) {
  return;
 }

%>

<script type="text/javascript">
 window.close();
</script>

After the JSP has run, an empty html page with the following source can be seen:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
2 

 os.write(someText.getBytes());
os.write("<script type=\\"text/javascript\\"> window.close();</script>");
  os.flush();
  os.close();
 } catch (IOException e) {
  return;
 } catch (Exception e) {
  return;
 }

%>
  • the problem was that you closed the output stream before finishing writing to it this way the javascript will never appear on the page.
3

That doesn’t seem to work.

I have to do it like like this to be able to write it to os:


<%
 String someText = "bla bla bla";
 String javaScript = "<script type=\\"text/javascript\\">window.close();</script>";
 
 // Flush to browser 
 response.setContentType("text/plain");
 response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=message.txt");
 try {
  ServletOutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();
  os.write(someText.getBytes());
  os.write(javaScript.getBytes());
  os.flush();
  os.close();
 } catch (IOException e) {
  return;
 } catch (Exception e) {
  return;
 }
%>

The result of this, is that the javascript will be added to the end of the file that get saved. It will not be included in the html page itself. I want the opposite.

Any other suggestions?

4

Oh I see the problem. I dont’t think you can resolve that easily. You could try to redirect to a page with the window.close() ->
response.sendRedirect(“clospage.html”);
at the very beginning.

5

I think the problem may be you are sending plain text out to the browser:

response.setContentType(“text/plain”);

but you are expecting it to function like html (using the javascript etc)… why exactly are you sending plain text back out?

6

I’m setting the plain text content type to make sure the browser downloads the file as plain text.

It looks like that after I’ve closed the outputStream I can’t do any more processing in the JSP. Even if I remove the response.setContentType and response.setHeader methods it still behaves this way.

I’m starting to think that there’s no way around this…??

7