Spring REST - create .zip file and send it to the client

Question

I want to create .zip file that contains my zipped files that I recieve from backend, and then send this file to the user. For 2 days I have been looking for the answer and

Answer 1

I am using REST Web Service of Spring Boot and I have designed the endpoints to always return ResponseEntity whether it is JSON or PDF or ZIP and I came up with the following solution which is partially inspired by denov's answer in this question as well as another question where I learned how to convert ZipOutputStream into byte[] in order to feed it to ResponseEntity as output of the endpoint.

Anyway, I created a simple utility class with two methods for pdf and zip file download

@Component
public class FileUtil {
    public BinaryOutputWrapper prepDownloadAsPDF(String filename) throws IOException {
        Path fileLocation = Paths.get(filename);
        byte[] data = Files.readAllBytes(fileLocation);

        HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
        headers.setContentType(MediaType.parseMediaType("application/pdf"));
        String outputFilename = "output.pdf";
        headers.setContentDispositionFormData(outputFilename, outputFilename);
        headers.setCacheControl("must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");

        return new BinaryOutputWrapper(data, headers); 
    }

    public BinaryOutputWrapper prepDownloadAsZIP(List filenames) throws IOException {
        HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders();
        headers.setContentType(MediaType.parseMediaType("application/zip"));
        String outputFilename = "output.zip";
        headers.setContentDispositionFormData(outputFilename, outputFilename);
        headers.setCacheControl("must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");

        ByteArrayOutputStream byteOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ZipOutputStream zipOutputStream = new ZipOutputStream(byteOutputStream);

        for(String filename: filenames) {
            File file = new File(filename); 
            zipOutputStream.putNextEntry(new ZipEntry(filename));           
            FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(file);
            IOUtils.copy(fileInputStream, zipOutputStream);
            fileInputStream.close();
            zipOutputStream.closeEntry();
        }           
        zipOutputStream.close();
        return new BinaryOutputWrapper(byteOutputStream.toByteArray(), headers); 
    }
}

And now the endpoint can easily return ResponseEntity as shown below using the byte[] data and custom headers that is specifically tailored for pdf or zip.

@GetMapping("/somepath/pdf")
public ResponseEntity generatePDF() {
    BinaryOutputWrapper output = new BinaryOutputWrapper(); 
    try {
        String inputFile = "sample.pdf"; 
        output = fileUtil.prepDownloadAsPDF(inputFile);
        //or invoke prepDownloadAsZIP(...) with a list of filenames
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        //Do something when exception is thrown
    } 
    return new ResponseEntity<>(output.getData(), output.getHeaders(), HttpStatus.OK); 
}

The BinaryOutputWrapper is a simple immutable POJO class I created with private byte[] data; and org.springframework.http.HttpHeaders headers; as fields in order to return both data and headers from utility method.