Delete server-side file upon browser close

Why don't you have the file uploaded to the temporary directory on the server ( i.e. - GetTempDirectory() )? It'll eventually be removed on its own.

If you're wanting to go with the JavaScript option, you could use a variable in your JavaScript to determine whether or not to remove the file when the window is closed.

Example:

<script language="text/javascript">

     doDeleteOnClose = true;

     // Function called before closing the window

     function deleteFileOnClose() {

          if (doDeleteOnClose) {

               // Code to delete the file

          }

     }

     // Function called before submission of the form

     function doBeforeSubmit() {

          doDeleteOnClose = false;

          return true;

     }

</script>

<form onSubmit="javascript: doBeforeSubmit();">

     <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />

</form>

--

Daniel Jeffery

Vivio Technologies

http://www.viviotech.net/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffda

You can't really know when the browser is closed. You only know when the browser made its last request. You can use onSessionEnd to do this sort of cleanup, as that will run when the session has timed out (by default, 20 minutes after the last request from the browser).

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

http://www.figleaf.com/

http://training.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on

GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized

instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

Read this before you post:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/607238

It depends on how time sensitive you want this to be.

The easy way would be to put the code to clean up these directories in the OnSessionEnd() event of an Applicaiton.cfc.  This event will fire when the session ends after the time out period expires (20 minutes by default).

If you want something to actually happen when the popup is closed.  Since it is a JavaScript popup, there are JavaScript events fired when it closes.  You could write code that executes when this event happens.  That code could easily use AJAX or some other method to make a request to a 'cleanup.cfm' page which wuld do the desired task.

If I where to do number two, I would still do number one to cover all the cases where the something happens that does not fire off the event, like the user closes the entire browser or have their browser or computer crash, etc.

And if you are doing number one, you should ask yourself if there is enough benifit to number two to bother with all the extra work to create and maintain another section of code to have this happen twenty minutes sooner then it is going to happen anyway.

We use a different approach.  We have a scheduled job that looks in designated directories and deletes anything more than 30 days old. 

I would think that J2EE sessions are the only types of sessions that know when the browser is closed, so you would have to use J2EE session vars, and then in your onSessionEnd, go through the process of terminating the file.

Note that in your onSessionEnd, you cannot reference, SESSION scope, since it doesn't exist anymore.  You'll have to reference the session object argument that you can pass in as an argument.