Well, first I know that this question was already asked several times. But I couldn’t find the best solution yet.
- IFrame.. well it works but actually browsers like FF just shows multiple file-save dialogs at once. And if you want to download a lot small files this would be annoying.
- Java Applet.. should also work but I am not a real java expert but I just heard that file actions need an authorized applet or something like that. So this isn’t the best solution.
- Flash.. Not sure about file-actions via flash – but read that’s problematic to do such things with flash.
So what I actually want to have is: the user can select multiple files (no matter how it works) then he can press a download button and then he is able to select a folder to save the files there. Of course this should work for the most browser, at least the most used browsers like Chrome, FF, Iexplorer.
Which solution would you recommend. I am sure that it is possible, I already saw it on some websites.
It’s generally a bad idea from user experience standpoint to have a few different download windows pop up with download offers. Especially if there are a lot of files selected. Normally what sites do is if more than one file is selected, they package the files into an archive (zip or gz) and then offer to download that. There are a few different free archiving libraries out there that you could use.