Download Multiple files in one HTTP request

Question

how is it possible to download multiple files in one HTTP request? what i mean it's like when you have multiple attachments and you select what you want to download then press download so they will be automaticcaly downloaded and you don't have to click on each one manually.

i'm using PHP as a serverside srcipting.

Answer 1

May be you can use JS to open multiple popups each loading a download URL. I hope its the only way..

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

That is practically not usable due to poor browser support. You can pack them into a tar or zip file at server side and serve the archive file though.

Answer 4

I think it's not possible since each HTTP request has only one URI.

Answer 5

Dunno about one HTTP request, but if you want them all at once you can loop through them while changing the header('Location:') for each of them while redirecting to the immediate download script. Though, that would be redundant, and ugly; I think the best way would be to zip them all, there are instructions on how to do so in the PHP Documentation.

Answer 6

You can zip the file with PHP, serverside, and request the file or return it from within your script by setting the appropriate headers, see ZipArchive class

Or you create a special client that can parse your then self-specified message format (a flash app, a plugin) - but if your client is simply your browser you'll get one response with a fixed content-length from the server.