The single-part and multi-part archives

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Help / WLanguage / WLanguage functions / Standard functions / Archive functions

Overview
Single-part archive
Multi-part archive
Overview
Principle
Please note: Single- and multipart archives

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The single-part and multi-part archives

Overview

Two types of archives are available:

single-part archive.
multi-part archive.

Only the single-part archives are available.

Single-part archive

A single-part archive is a single file of type ".WDZ", ".ZIP", ".CAB" or ".7z": an archive file contains all compressed files.

The archive occupies the necessary space to contain all the compressed files.

Example Your program needs to save several large files. Your program can create an archive containing all the files to save. This archive will increase the available disk space.

Multi-part archive

Overview

A multi-file archive contains several files (or sub-archives) of identical size. The size of each sub-archive is defined when creating the multi-file archive.

The first sub-archive is a file whose type is ".WDZ", ".ZIP" or "7z". The following sub-archives are files numbered from 1 to N via their extension.

For archives in WINDEV (WDZ) format, sub-parts have the following extensions: ".001", ".002", ..., ".NNN".

For archives in standard ZIP format, sub-parts have the following extension: ".Z01", ".Z02", ..., ".ZNN".

Note Archives in ".CAB" format must be single-part.

Principle

To create a multi-part archive:

Create an archive (zipCreate).
Add files to this archive. The added files are automatically compressed (zipAddFile, zipAddDirectory).
Split this archive into several sub-archives (zipSplit). The sub-archives have the same size. You define the size of the sub-archives.

Once the multi-file archive is created, the sub-archives can be stored on different media (diskette, CD, ...).

Sub-archives can be grouped together (zipMerge): the archive becomes single-part again.

Remark: All these operations can also be performed using WDZip.

Please note: Single- and multipart archives

Some archiving features can only be used on the single-part archives (adding files, deleting files, creating a self-extracting executable, ...). To perform these operations on a multi-part archive, all you have to do is merge the sub-archives (zipMerge) to get a single-part archive.

From a multi-part archive, you can only:

Merge the different parts (zipMerge),
Get information about the archive and the files in the archive (zipExtractPath, zipInfoFile, zipListFile, etc.),
Extract the files (zipExtractFile, zipExtractAll).

Related Examples:

Complete examples (WINDEV): WD Zip

[ + ] This example presents the use of archiving WLanguage functions with compression.
The following topics are presented in this example:
1/ How to create an archive?
2/ How to compress and uncompress files?
3/ How to manage Drag&Drop from the file explorer of Windows to a TreeView control?
Summary of the example supplied with WINDEV:
This example allows you to create and read compressed archives in WDZ, ZIP, CAB and RAR format (in read-only). This feature can be very useful to manage the automatic backups. Furthermore, the example allows you to create multi-volume archives.