Issue
I have a usecase where I want to read data from database and send it to frontend as a downloadable zip file. I am stuck on how to achieve this using node js and express.
For now I was trying to send just a downloadable json file and was confused how to achieve it.
What I have tried so far ->
const data = db.read() // fetch an array of objects.
const myBuffer = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(data)); //creating a buffer
const readableStream = Readable.from(myBuffer);
res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/octet-stream');
res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename=\"my json file.json\"');
readableStream.pipe(res);
trying this from postman gives me json directly. My question is how to create a downloadable zip file of data here and send it to client. I want to make sure I don’t use fs to write a file on server and then send it. Any help and guide would be great, Thanks!!
Solution
As @ardritkrasniqi suggested to use a third party npm package, I was able to make an in memory zip file and send it to client using npm package archiver.
I created it like this ->
const data = db.read() // fetch an array of objects.
const myBuffer = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(data)); //creating a buffer
const archive = archiver.create('zip', {});
archive.append(myBuffer, { name: 'test.json'});
res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'application/zip');
res.setHeader('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename=\"test.zip\"');
archive.pipe(res);
archive.finalize();
Hope this will be helpful for others who are trying to achieve the same.
PS. I am using express as my backend node framework.
Answered By – Atin Singh
This Answer collected from stackoverflow, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5 , cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0