Download and open PDF file using Ajax
Here is how I got this working
$.ajax({ url: '<URL_TO_FILE>', success: function(data) { var blob=new Blob([data]); var link=document.createElement('a'); link.href=window.URL.createObjectURL(blob); link.download="<FILENAME_TO_SAVE_WITH_EXTENSION>"; link.click(); }});<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>Updated answer using download.js
$.ajax({ url: '<URL_TO_FILE>', success: download.bind(true, "<FILENAME_TO_SAVE_WITH_EXTENSION>", "<FILE_MIME_TYPE>")});
You don't necessarily need Ajax for this. Just an <a> link is enough if you set the content-disposition to attachment in the server side code. This way the parent page will just stay open, if that was your major concern (why would you unnecessarily have chosen Ajax for this otherwise?). Besides, there is no way to handle this nicely acynchronously. PDF is not character data. It's binary data. You can't do stuff like $(element).load(). You want to use completely new request for this. For that <a href="pdfservlet/filename.pdf">pdf</a> is perfectly suitable.
To assist you more with the server side code, you'll need to tell more about the language used and post an excerpt of the code attempts.
I don't really think that any of the past answers spotted out the problem of the original poster. They all presume a GET request while the poster was trying to POST data and get a download in response.
In the course of searching for any better answer we found this jQuery Plugin for Requesting Ajax-like File Downloads.
In its "heart" it creates a "temporary" HTML form containing the given data as input fields. This form is appended to the document and posted to the desired URL. Right after that the form is removed again:
jQuery('<form action="'+ url +'" method="'+ (method||'post') +'">'+inputs+'</form>') .appendTo('body').submit().remove()Update Mayur's answer looks pretty promising and very simple in comparison to the jQuery plug-in I referred to.