Question

I am building a webapp for a friend where the user interface should allow users to press a button, and it should somehow upload all of the contents of the CD-ROM/DVD they have inserted, to a server.

I can’t really have the standard “Choose file…” of the browser, because there are many different files inside the CD, under many different folders. So I can’t have my users choose all the files individually – even if I implement the HTML5 multi-selection, they would still have to navigate through all the sub-folders (there may be several levels). And plus this needs to work on IE8, so multi-selection won’t work.

What are my best choices to achieve this? I’m looking for the most transparent solution – downloading a Java applet or an external plugin would be too much of an overhead. Can flash achieve something like this? Flash is still a plugin, but it would be acceptable because it’s used in many places and doesn’t require “permission to run” as Java applets do.

Thanks

Answer 1

Emm… quite interesting

Anyway if to lean back on Java Applet solution… I don’t think there should be some single API to handle all the mentioned points

According to your tasks here is some kind of solutions combination…

I can’t really have the standard “Choose file…” of the browser,
because there are many different files inside the CD, under many
different folders.

• If you have a bootable CDs or something… In this case I can advise to
  use *.iso image file generation of you CD. You can use JIIC lib
  for this

• …and concerning the uploading I can advise using HttpClient
  (on client side) + FileUpload (on servlet side) that will allow
  to upload ~2Gb weight files… (HttpClient tips) In your CD (case of big
  file reading) I do recommend override FileBody.writeTo(OutputStream)
  method to set reading file by chunks support

• or if your generated file is really huge you can additionally use RandomAccessFile to
  read/write files by index look at readFully() method

And one more thing…

…So I can’t have my users choose all the files individually – even
if I implement the HTML5 multi-selection, they would still have to
navigate through all the sub-folders (there may be several levels).
And plus this needs to work on IE8, so multi-selection won’t work.

• In Java Applet it will work 🙂 If you just need some kind of
  multi selection (and it is not a bootable CD or something) you can use
  Swing’s JFileChooser for this task. Take a look closer at method
  like setMultiSelectionEnabled(boolean)…

  • … concerning the

‘…they would still have to navigate through all the sub-folders
(there may be several levels)’

… you can simply (not to upload folders) but pre-pack those levels to lets say a zip file to upload the zip file to server (correct me if I am wrong here because the idea of levels is not pretty clear described in your question now) .

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Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know more details because quite rare task as for web apps to upload the whole CDs… As a rule, it is a pretty heavy stuff :S

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