Download Problems

When you have selected a time period and a set of variables, the data is sent to your browser in text form. The browser should prompt you for a file name and then save the ASCII text in the file, or display the text with an application like Windows WordPad.

However your browser may cache the data, in which case the second time you request data you are provided with the results from the first request. This behaviour is seen in Internet Explorer 6.

This is a problem with our data server which we hope to correct soon. It is seen with Internet Explorer 6, but not with Mozilla/Netscape.

If you click the Refresh button you will see the second request results in the browser window, which you can save to a file using File->Save As.... Then do a Back to return to the applet. The applet must be completely restarted, which means you loose your previous settings.

Another workaound in Internet Explorer is to change the cache settings on your browser. Do:

  Tools->Internet Options...
  General
    Temporary Internet files
      Settings
	Check for newer versions of stored pages
	* Every visit to the page
    OK
  OK

These cache settings are inefficient for general browsing. After you have downloaded your data, change the "Check for newer versions..." setting back to either Automatically or Every time you start....

Internet Explorer 5.5

Early versions of Internet Explorer 5.5 do not prompt you for a file name, but instead display the data. You can do a "File->SaveAs" to save the data, and then do a "Back" to get back to the applet. This slows things down because the applet is then re-started from scratch.

Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 1 will prompt you for a file name, but it provides a name based on the web page you are visiting (like asciiDownload.jsp), and then saves the HTML text from the web page instead of the ASCII data! To avoid this problem, select "Open this file from its current location" rather than "Save this file to disk". The data will be displayed in the browser window, and then you can do a "File->SaveAs" to save it to a file.

These are acknowledged Microsoft problems. See Microsoft Knowledge Base articles Q267991, and Q279667.