I would like to open multiple download dialog boxes after the user clicks on a link.
Essentially what I am trying to do is allow the user to download multiple files. I don’t want to zip up the files and deliver one zipped file because that would require a lot of server resources given that some of the files are some what large.
My guess is that there may be some way with javascript to kick off multiple requests when the user clicks on a certain link. Or maybe there might be a way on the server side to start off another request.
Unless the client is configured to automatically download files, you can’t accomplish this without packaging the files in a single response (like ZIP solution you mentioned.) This would be a security issue if a Web site would be able to put arbitrarily large number of files on your disk without telling you.
By the way, you might be overestimating the cost of packaging in a single file. Streaming files is usually an I/O-bound operation. There should be enough CPU cycles to spare for piping the data through some storage(tar)/compression(zip) methods.