asp.net file downloading - track downloaded size

Question

I am trying to design a system for something like this with ASP.net/C#.

The users pay for downloading some content (files- mp3s/PDFs,doc etc).I should be able to tra

Answer 1

To do custom byte serving like this, you will need to implement your own http handler.

This handler should do the following:

• Implement some kind of authentication on the http handler, so you know who you are dealing with.
• Then you will need to implement some kind of logging for files requested and files allowed to be downloaded.
• Implement etags and expires headers for client side caching.
• Server side caching
• Deflate, gzip compression
• If you want to support resumable downloads, you will need to implement 206 partial responses. This is essential for any kind of streaming and serving pdfs.

So you should be handling the following http headers:

• ETag

• Expires

• Accept-Ranges

• Range

• If-Range

• Last-Modified

• If-Match
• If-None-Match
• If-Modified-Since
• If-Unmodified-Since
• Unless-Modified-Since

If you are looking for a sample implementations of http handlers check out: http://code.google.com/p/talifun-web/wiki

It has a static file handler that implements all the above http headers, client side and server side caching and even compression.

There is also a log module and an authorization module that should go a long way into how to implement authentication and logging.