Hi there
I was wondering how is it possible for a Server to send a folder with lets say text files to a Client. How can we copy a folder and its contents and sending it as bytes to a client.

Thanks

Assuming that you know how to send files over the sockets, sending a folder should be almost similar to sending files.

As I see it, a folder is just a container to hold files and the *real* data lies in the files which it contains. So there are two things which you need to do:

1) Recursively traverse the contents of the folder and send the files.
2) Figure out a mechanism where the sender can somehow communicate the folder hierarchy to the receiver, so that it can create the same hierarchy at its end.

hope this helps.

A thought: it might be easiest to gzip up the directory structure you want at the sender, and unpack it at the receiver. Java has ZIP helper classes (look in java.util.zip). It solves the problem of how to communicate the directory hierarchy, though you still have to traverse the tree of files to create the archive, unless you cheat and run a gzip command outside your Java program. :-)

HTH,
-nick

This is a good idea to use the java.util.zip class for zipping the folder. However, depending on System to get the gzip tool to actually zipping the directory may not be suitable (a user may not have gzip tool installed, i.e. it doesn't come with all OS, specifically win32 versions).
You could also use jar utility of java to jar the contents (since its natively installed once you have jre installed in your system). Its almost as tar, with j prefix.

I guess you should now have enough options to choose from.
Happy java-(ing)!!!

An Introduction to Network Programming with Java

Jan Graba

ISBN 0 321 11614 3

Is actually a very good read - The site below also has the java examples from the book. [EDIT: They have password locked the resources - Didn't use to be that way as far as I remember]



http://www.booksites.net/download/graba/download.htm

I also like the idea of compressing the folder and then sending it as one file over the network. I dont see compression as an overhead here because the data needs to be send over the network, where sending raw uncompressed data can be *far* more costly than locally compressing the data.

Is it possible for you to later share the class you will code to compress and transfer the data? I was working on something like this few months back on C#. Didn't finish it though.

Although manolakis is actually trying to do this, but if I get the chance I may try it out.