I have a need for a mechanism that allows multiple files to be downloaded to the user’s computer. For example, if you were to purchase a music album you would be able to click “download” and download every track. The actual media may vary, but primarily we’re looking at it for delivering music files. We don’t want to offer a list of URLs (except as a fall back) and we don’t want to provide an archive since a. archives are confusing for most users and b. we’re only providing links to vendor sites and not handling the media itself, therefore aggregating it into an archive is not viable.
I’m aware of multipart responses in HTTP but this isn’t supported by all browsers that our end users are using. The only solution that we can see is to use a download manager of some kind. I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think one is possible in Javascript, but a Java version should be. I wondered if anyone had any thoughts though? Basically, instead of just specifying a filename when saving a file, I want to be able to select a directory and all files download into it. And does anyone know of a product that would be suitable that we could use, free or paid for. I’m not having a lot of luck finding this type of download manager.
We don’t have the files on our platform, we just provide a link to our vendor. We do not deliver the media ourselves. Nor do we have any interest in doing so. In fact, that would be in breach of contract in some cases
We don’t want to use archives. The average user would not expect to download an entire album of music in a ZIP file and then extract it to their music directory. They expect to specify a directory and all tracks just go there. In fact, that’s more complicated than most want, where they want to just click an order link and have it appear in their music library, but we need to give them the ability to at least choose the directory that they want the album to be saved in
I did point both of these out in my original post. Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m quite capable of providing a single download, to put file into an archive and to extract them again, all via PHP. We just don’t want that solution, nor do our clients.
One vendor that we work with does have a download manager that we essentially “inject” into our page that allows the user to download all the media in a minimal number of clicks, but we can’t use it ourselves for other vendors. We need one that we can use ourselves for all vendors.