I am having a problem with a website that produces a file download over and SSL connection. After a couple of days of dealing with the error that IE could not download the file from the web site and implementing all the settings others have dealt with to make IE as insecure as possible, leaving pages and download data in the cache I got the file to download with the response object working but now I have another issue.
When I am generating the data for download on the web server I display a progress bar in the browser to let the user know that the data generation might take 10 or 20 seconds and that my app did not forget them. Once the data generation is complete on the web server I store it in a database, since the application is in a web farm, and post back to the client a new page, not the file yet, of the logged in users specific information so once the download is complete the user does not have to navigate back to this page to do another download. Then with Java script in the browser I perform another submit back to the web server to cause the web application to new send the download file. The web application receives the post back and gathers the information from the database and feeds it to the Response object as binary data and writes sending the data to IE. At this point the page I want displayed in IE is showing from the reprevious post back and IE shows the security message at the top of the browser window that a Download has been started and the user must click to allow the download. This is all working fine so far. Once the user clicks to allow the file download the browser screen is blanked out and the file download commences with no problem but leaving the user with a blank screen in IE. This problem does not occur in a Non SSL sight. I am not really sure what it causing the blanking of the IE screen. My first thought is that the page displayed in IE is not cached so when the user clicks the error message to allow the file download IE cannot display the page because it does not exist in cache. But I set the Cache for the page and the download file before sending each to Public. I think I might be able to get around this by saving the file content to a disk location on a web server an presenting the user with a link to commence the download, but since I am working in a farm I did not want to deal with than hassel and did not want to have files being saved so my file streams are all in memory. So to recap, I am wanting to do the file download after the security message is displayed and the user clicks to allow the download but I do not want the page in IE to be blanked out. I am out of ideas on this so anythink would be helpful.
