Returning Multiple Files from MVC Action

Question

So I've got an MVC 3 application that has a couple places where a text file gets generated and returned in an action using:

return File(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(someString),                  "text/plain", "Filename.extension"); 

and this works fabulously. Now i've got a situation where I'm trying to return a pair of files in a similar fashion. On the view, i have an action link like "Click here to get those 2 files" and i'd like both files to be downloaded much like the single file is downloaded in the above code snippet.

How can I achieve this? Been searching around quite a bit and haven't even seen this question posed anywhere...

Answer 1

Building on Yogendra Singh's idea and using DotNetZip:

var outputStream = new MemoryStream();  using (var zip = new ZipFile()) {     zip.AddEntry("file1.txt", "content1");     zip.AddEntry("file2.txt", "content2");     zip.Save(outputStream); }  outputStream.Position = 0; return File(outputStream, "application/zip", "filename.zip"); 

Update 2019/04/10: As @Alex pointed out, zipping is supported natively since .NET Framework 4.5, from JitBit and others:

using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream()) {    using (var archive = new ZipArchive(memoryStream, ZipArchiveMode.Create, true))    {       var file1 = archive.CreateEntry("file1.txt");       using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(file1.Open()))       {          streamWriter.Write("content1");       }        var file2 = archive.CreateEntry("file2.txt");       using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(file2.Open()))       {          streamWriter.Write("content2");       }    }     return File(memoryStream.ToArray(), "application/zip", "Images.zip") }