12-10-2018, 11:18 AM
Client-side unzipping, even if we could get it working, isn't really an option as it required downloading the entire zip for every page load.
I've looked into this pretty extensively before - it's not something I'm just dismissing for no reason. I still think the best solution is to stop using zips outside of extremely limited circumstances but I'm happy to consider other options. The issue I'm having is that it's hard to get a straight answer whether or not a zip needs to be extracted to use some of these functions. Reading the file list, for instance, does not appear to require unzipping it. This function would, on the surface, appears to be able to grab data from a zip file but I can't tell if that requires extracting the specified file or not.
And, like you said, how exactly do we even display this data if we can get it out of the zip without creating a massive issue for the server? Some of these archives have hundreds or thousands of files so it's not as simple as just displaying some thumbnails on the page.
I've looked into this pretty extensively before - it's not something I'm just dismissing for no reason. I still think the best solution is to stop using zips outside of extremely limited circumstances but I'm happy to consider other options. The issue I'm having is that it's hard to get a straight answer whether or not a zip needs to be extracted to use some of these functions. Reading the file list, for instance, does not appear to require unzipping it. This function would, on the surface, appears to be able to grab data from a zip file but I can't tell if that requires extracting the specified file or not.
And, like you said, how exactly do we even display this data if we can get it out of the zip without creating a massive issue for the server? Some of these archives have hundreds or thousands of files so it's not as simple as just displaying some thumbnails on the page.