如何设置API（结构）以从服务器下载文件

Question

So I am making a program in java that would download a file from a server. I have a server set up with bottle web framework.

Now I'm not sure how exactly I should transfer the data from the server to the client side.

Here are the two ideas I've thought of.

1. Make the file I need to download as a static file on the server and just use the java to download it.

2. Send a post request to the server which replies with part of the data and I have to iterate through it until I have the full file.

Number 1 would be the easiest but I guess anyone could access it that way so it might not be the best idea.

Do you guys have any suggestion on how I should structure it?

Answer 1

Assuming you are using Servlets or Servlet based frameworks.

Write the file content to the response and set the Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=yourfilename Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=yourfilename with the file name. If needed you may need to set the Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary header as well.

Answer 2

For 2. A GET request can return the data. More logical to use GET than POST as POST is used to upload files. Then you can include the file content in the response with the content type also set to type.

Answer 3

May be this will help you

from bottle import static_file    
@route('/download/<filename:path>')
def download(filename):
   return static_file(filename, root='/path/to/static/files', download=filename)