Download Multiple Files in One Http Request

How to download multiple files with one HTTP request?

Zipping is the only option that will have consistent result on all browsers. If it's not an option because you don't know zips can be generated dynamically, well, they can. If it's not an option because you have a grudge against zip files, well..

MIME/multipart is for email messages and/or POST transmission to the HTTP server. It was never intended to be received and parsed on the client side of a HTTP transaction. Some browsers do implement it, some others don't.

As another alternative, you could have a JavaScript script opening windows downloading the individual files. Or a Java Applet (requires Java Runtimes on the machines, if it's an enterprise application, that shouldn't be a problem [as the NetAdmin can deploy it on the workstations]) that would download the files in a directory of the user's choice.

Download multiple files with a single action

HTTP does not support more than one file download at once.

There are two solutions:

• Open x amount of windows to initiate the file downloads (this would be done with JavaScript)
• preferred solution create a script to zip the files

Download Multiple files in one HTTP request

It is possible to send a multipart response in HTTP:

In general, HTTP treats a multipart message-body no differently than any other media type: strictly as payload. […] an HTTP user agent SHOULD follow the same or similar behavior as a MIME user agent would upon receipt of a multipart type.

[…] If an application receives an unrecognized multipart subtype, the application MUST treat it as being equivalent to "multipart/mixed".

But since Firefox is the only browser that I know about to support such multipart responses (apart from multipart/byterange), you should use some archive file format for this purpose.

How can I let a user download multiple files when a button is clicked?

The best way to do this is to have your files zipped and link to that:

The other solution can be found here: How to make a link open multiple pages when clicked

Which states the following:

HTML:

<a href="#" class="yourlink">Download</a>

JS:

$('a.yourlink').click(function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    window.open('mysite.com/file1');
    window.open('mysite.com/file2');
    window.open('mysite.com/file3');
});

Having said this, I would still go with zipping the file, as this implementation requires JavaScript and can also sometimes be blocked as popups.

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