[Helma-user] downloading binaries with helma.Http

[Hannes Wallnoefer]

2006/10/18, Stefan Rinner <rist at mac.com>:
> I need to download some files and store them as byte-array in my DB
> but helma.Http.getUrl returns the downloaded file as a String and
> converting this again to a byte[] leads to fucked up binaries on
> Windows - is there any method/option in helma.Http to download a file
> and retrieve the untouched byte[]?

I'm currently investigating in ways to fix this. It's going to be
difficult to solve the problem _and_ remain backwards compatible. Here
are some possible scenarios:

1) automatic binary/text mode depending on response content type.
would be backwards compatible, but intransparent and hard to do (just
think about the xhtml/xml content-type discussions with text/html vs.
application/xhtml+xml etc.) so I rule this one out.

2) add a switch to the Http class that lets people choose if they want
their content raw or stringified. Default could be stringified, so
that would preserve backwards compatibility. What I don't know is how
that switch method/property would be called.

3) provide two different properties in the result object, one for
binary and one for stringified content. The problem here is that we
always have to stringify the result, which in the case of larger
binary contents would be really really wasteful. So I also rule this
one out.

4) make content always raw binary, and add a method to the result set
that converts it to a string on demand.

All things considered, I think I would rank solution 2) slightly
before solution 4). What I haven't come up with yet is a good naming
idea. Proposals anybody?

hannes