[Catalyst] How to send raw HTTP response

[Christian Lackas]

* Tomas Doran <bobtfish at bobtfish.net> [080925 23:06]:

Hi Tomas,

thanks for the prompt reply (also to all others).

> Looking at the source code for Catalyst::write, and 
> Catalyst::Engine::write, you need to say $c->finalize_headers, after
> which just writing to STDOUT as above should do the right thing..

This is supposed to print out the HTTP header immediately, right?

I tried this here:

    sub download : Local {
        my ($self, $c) = @_;
        my ($filename, @files) = getAllfiles();
        $c->response->content_type('application/zip');
        $c->response->header('Content-Disposition' => "attachment; filename=$filename.zip");
        $c->finalize_headers();
        $c->response->{body} = undef;
    
        my $ZIP = Archive::Zip->new();
    
        foreach my $file (@files) {
            my ($basename) = $file =~ m{.*/(.*)};
            $ZIP->addFile($file, $basename);
        }
        $ZIP->writeToFileHandle(*STDOUT);
    }

However, with this code I don't get a HTTP header at all (when run under
Catalyst server) and additionally Catalyst appends an error message
after my ZIP file.

So my questions are:
    How do I tell Catalyst:
    - to either send no HTTP header at all, or to force it to print the
      header at a time convenient for me (e.g. just before the ZIP)?
    - that I handled everything in the controller and that it should just
      stop with processing the request (so nothing is send afterwards).

> However, I'd have thought that clients on the other end would be
> somewhat unhappy with not getting a Content-Length header...

As pointed out in this thread already, this mainly means that a browser
is not able to show a proper progress bar. If the ZIP is downloaded
incompletely, even though the browser may not able to report that
correctly, the uncompressing will fail with a truncation warning.

Christian