Progress monitoring over non-chunked HTTP traffic

[Jean Revertera <j....@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

We are currently in the process of implementing a client for transferring
relatively big documents (up to 100Mb) over SOAP/HTTP with MTOM.

With regards to the transfer size, we would like to provide some kind of
progress monitoring to the end-user. We already successfully implemented
such feature on another project simply by wiring ourselves to the stream
produced from the DataHandler, counting the number of bytes read (this is
probably not 100% reliable in all situations but it worked good enough for
our needs).

However, the server is this time behind a reverse proxy, which will
actually discard any chunked HTTP traffic, and we cannot change that. The
consequence is then that the underlying HttpURLConnection will buffer the
whole request into memory in order to compute the total content length,
effectively preventing any possible kind of monitoring (in addition to the
possibly huge memory consumption).

Before we go implementing our own HTTP conduit, I would like to know if we
are not missing something... Is there any easier way to implement such
feature with relatively simple means?

Any insight appreciated,
Thanks,
Jean