I'm publishing a page URL
eg mysite.com/disclaimer/someinfo
this page shows an agreement, and if the user clicks the agree button then a PDF file is streamed as an attachment.

The purpose of this is the user can then share this URL but anyone else following the link must also read the agreement before downloading the file. The actual file does not have a URL but is held elsewhere on the server so the only way to download...

In the end the answer was very simple.

I've had a great read through the thread you suggested and some other suggested from there and so on, was greatly amused by the closed thread that had the helpful comment "JUST USE AJAX" yes in proper shouty-case :)

It's a great site this one and I am sure I'll keep coming back, thank you for the friendly helpful welcome.

In the end the answer was a very...

I have a very long running server side process that imports items from an XML file. It needs to run in a simple web page. Importing 3 items takes about 25 seconds due to a very slow running API process and not much can be done about that. In total the process needs to import about 1800 items, so there is no way this can run before the page can complete without timing out. Also I need to give some kind of simple visual progress to the user (importing...