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Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:50:10 +0000
From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com>
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
Subject: Binary data [was Bulk CSV import?]
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User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

A couple more thoughts about importing and exporting aggregate batches of
document-oriented data.

* A desktop-friendly way to bundle documents is in a ZIP file. 
Unfortunately that's a binary format, and _list/_external use a JSON (UTF-8)
protocol.

I see that an _external function can give back base64-encoded binary data:
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/ExternalProcesses

I don't think _list or _show can, and in any case you'd need a ZIP library
written in Javascript.

Maybe this is too far out of scope for a JS-backed CouchApp. But with
erlview it makes a lot more sense: you have a binary-clean interface, and
many libraries available for handling binary formats. e.g.
http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/zip.html

* The other option I've tried is MIME multipart documents, but in my testing
I found that browsers don't handle them well. At best you just get the first
one saved. I think that option can be discarded.

Regards,

Brian.