On-Click A-tag with Href, socket gets disconnected

Question

I am working on a project using socket.io. I want to give user some links to download a file as

<a href="<path>" >Link Name</a>

When I click on link to download file, my socket gets disconnected.

When I use this

<a href="<path>" target="_blank">Link Name</a>

it works fine. Any reason why this happens?

Answer 1

When you follow a link within the same window, the current page's environment gets completely torn down, including the entire JavaScript environment in which your code (and socket.io's code) is running. That's why it does this when you click a link to a new page within the current window, but not when you open a new window (target="_blank").

You'll want to look at the various single-page-application techniques, which mostly involve swapping content into the current page using ajax (and updating the hash so the URL is different) without loading an entirely new page into the window.