[thelist] Downloading multiple documents through an IE browser with one request?

[Wade Armstrong]

on 4/8/02 9:44 AM, Loren Hadley at loren.hadley at verizon.net wrote:

> We've developed an Extranet site where users can download zipped
> archives of technical documentation for a variety of products Now however,
> they want to be able to choose from a menu and select multiple archives
> for download at one time (rather than selecting one product at a time.)
> We envision doing this by providing a menu of all available products by
> category with a check box by each product title.  Users could select all
> the products they desired information on then submit the order.
>
> So far, no problem - What we are not sure of is how to get the browser
> to download multiple documents with one request.

I had to do this for a client - it came down to either:
1. New HTTP request for each file, which functionally meant opening a new
browser window for each file to prevent a file with a known content-type
from displaying in the browser rather than being downloaded
2. Zip each of the requested files into a single large archive, on-the-fly.
There's a lot of components that will do this in ASP, I'm sure there are on
other platforms too.

We actually ended up doing 1 because they couldn¹t guarantee having an unzip
utility on all the users' computers!

I'd bet that you could come up with an option 3:
Install a client-side ActiveX or Java script that talked to the server and
could handle multiple downloads.
This would have a bunch of advantages:
- Not restricted to HTTP only
- Can roll security, purchasing, log-in, even logging into the script

Wade