I have a java application that writes a RandomAccessFile to the file system. It has to be a RAF because some things are not known until the end, where I then seek back and write some information at the start of the file.
I would like to somehow put the file into a zip archive. I guess I could just do this at the end, but this would involve copying all the data that has been written so far. Since these files can potentially grow very large, I would prefer a way that somehow did not involve copying the data.
Is there some way to get something like a "ZipRandomAccessFile", a la the ZipOutputStream which is available in the jdk?
It doesn't have to be jdk only, I don't mind taking in third party libraries to get the job done.
Any ideas or suggestions..?
Maybe you need to change the file format so it can be written sequentially.
In fact, since it is a Zip and Zip can contain multiple entries, you could write the sequential data to one ZipEntry and the data known 'only at completion' to a separate ZipEntry - which gives the best of both worlds.
It is easy to write, not having to go back to the beginning of the large sequential chunk. It is easy to read - if the consumer needs to know the 'header' data before reading the larger resource, they can read the data in that zip entry before proceeding.