Thanks for the insight. For pure simplicity, I agree that one file or message per request is the best way to go. I hope to be able to create a multipart http request class for dealing with form data and files sometime in the future.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Hunter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, June 03, 1999 1:58 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Sending Multipart POST data
>
>
> Kalbrener, Cyrus wrote:
> >
> > Possibly, but what if I need to send a binary file some time in the
> > future? Or multiple files? Or files and data?
>
> Easiest way to go is to send one file per request in binary format.
> There's no diff between a text or binary file. Both are just bytes.
> If you want to send multiple files, do so with multiple requests. You
> can even do keep-alive if you want.
>
> > The problem is I need to be able to create a distribuatable client
> > that I can trust to send data in a decipherable way
> regardless of what
> > kind of file(s) are pumped through it. It may mean using a
> > ServletInputStream on the server side and sifting through the data
> > myself.
> >
> > I am hoping that there is something I can use that is similar to
> > javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart to assemble the pieces
> and send them
> > off as part of a POST request. Failing that, some insight
> into how a
> > POST request is formatted might help.
>
> You can definitely encode the request into a "standard"
> format. The big
> advantage there is if you plan to leverage other people's tools or
> utils. If you're working in isolation, I'd just pump the file data in
> the POST body, and use HTTP headers to describe the posted content.
> They don't even have to be standard headers necessarily since you
> control both ends.
>
> If you want to go the standard route, you could write the client half
> of a multi-part/form-data request. It'd be fairly easy since
> you don't
> have to do any error checking. You'd lose some of the flexibility
> gained by "rolling your own" method. I'm not sure if there's a helper
> class anywhere for that.
>
> -jh-
>
> --
> Jason Hunter
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Book: http://www.servlets.com/book
> Article: http://www.javaworld.com/jw-12-1998/jw-12-servletapi.html
>
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