53

I want to stream content to clients which is possibly stored in db, which they would save as files.

Obviously res.download would do the job nicely, but none of the response.* functions accept a stream, only file paths.

I had a look at res.download impl and it just sets Content-Disposition header and then a sendfile.

So I could achieve this using this post as a guide. Node.js: pipe stream to response freezes over HTTPS

But it seems I would miss out on all the wrapping aspects that res.send performs.

Am I missing something here or should I just do the pipe and not worry about it - what is best practice here?

Currently creating temp files so I can just use res.download for now.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Tim
  • 1,615
  • 1
  • 14
  • 17
  • Try this method http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10207762/how-to-use-request-or-http-module-to-read-gzip-page-into-a-string/10603029#10603029 – Teemu Ikonen Oct 29 '12 at 00:06

2 Answers2

131

You can stream directly to the response object (it is a Stream).

A basic file stream would look something like this.

function(req, res, next) {
  if(req.url==="somethingorAnother") {
    res.setHeader("content-type", "some/type");
    fs.createReadStream("./toSomeFile").pipe(res);
  } else {
    next(); // not our concern, pass along to next middleware function
  }
}

This will take care of binding to data and end events.

Morgan ARR Allen
  • 10,556
  • 3
  • 35
  • 33
1

Make sure that your AJAX request from the client has an appropriate 'responseType' set. for example like

$http({
  method :'GET',
  url : http://url,
  params:{},
  responseType: 'arraybuffer'
}).success()
gsamaras
  • 71,951
  • 46
  • 188
  • 305
sasidhar79
  • 19
  • 3