Last month, I had to download course material from Microsoft. They specially opened up a WSS site, and provided all the downloads through document libraries. Very nice, however...this meant I had to 'click-download-click-download-click-download' all the documents in the gallery since there isn't a 'download all documents' option available.
I was a bit annoyed by the absence of such a feature, so I decided to create one myself. Thanks to the great extensibility capabilities of WSS v3, I was able to create a new add-in to document libraries which gives you a 'Download all documents' option in the action menu of the document library.
Clicking this option will generate a zipfile containing all the documents in the list and provides it as a download to you. I used the SharpZipLib to create the actual zipfile. I didn't want to 'eat' lots of server resources while creating the zipfile, so after you click it it immediatly starts writing to the reponse outputstream. This has one limitation though, if you get the 'save, open, run' dialog from your browser...you already have downloaded the entire zipfile to your machine.
I have provided two downloads for you:
- The pre-compiled solution package: click
- The sources for this feature: click