HTTP large file transfer

Question

It is necessary to transmit large file using web browser interface. Standard <input type=”file”> or <asp:FileUpload> do not provide enough feedback for the user of the application. What are the realistic ways to improve feedback such as progress bar, animation, etc? Target users are users with IE, Firefox and Safari browsers. All I know that animated GIFs are not working during file post, users are not looking at the progress line in the status bar or other small icons, and word AJAX is not that helpful in the solution of this problem :-)

EDITED: users do not want to install any ActiveXs or applets. Users are fine with <input type=”file”> but they want feedback – users keep referring youtube. How youtube did it? Is it a secret? The server part can be modified to have a custom handler. Did HTML authors and web browsers implementers make file upload control that completely useless?

Answer 1

We use a product for our .NET application, called SlickUpload: http://krystalware.com/Products/SlickUpload/

It provides upload progress indicators and information.

Answer 2

If you don't mind using silverlight and can build/host a WCF service or an HttpHandler you can check this one out. Silverlight Multi File Uploader will provide progress bar information and multi file upload.

Answer 3

If you wish to return status information about the file upload, you need to somehow interface your app to the webserver receiving the upload. Some servers will let you define an upload handler. Here is an example I found that uses Apache + ASP.

Answer 4

Chilkat controls have one that does this http://www.chilkatsoft.com/HttpActiveX.asp

They have ones for ASP, Ruby,Python etc.

Answer 5

If you can use flash for this, you could take a look at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/FlashUpload.aspx

There are sources and explanations for the project, so it could be a good starting point.

Answer 6

If you are familiar with Java, I recommend jUpload, it can be customized quite well and will split large files to prevent your server from choking.