Response with mixed file + generated contents

[Adrian Perez de Castro]

Hello to all,

First of all, I will introduce myself: my name is Adrian and I work for
the Free Software Office of the University of A Coruña (Spain). As part
of our tasks here, we are maintaining a mirror of several open source
projects (http://ftp.udc.es, also by ftp and rsync), which we are
planning to migrate from Apache to Nginx.

I am currently working on a replacement for the autoindex module
(currently named fancyindex) which outputs XHTML tables instead of a
big <pre> element. Also, it supports embedding a "readme" file
(currently using an <iframe>, which is useful to embed full HTML
documents inside the gerated indexes, but I am planning to add inline
support as well), and finally I would like to implement configurable
headers and footers for the listings.

After a quick read on the server's code, I would like to know a bit more
about how the output chain gets sent to the client, because I would
like to do the following when custom header/footer are enabled instead
of the builtin ones:

 1. Send custom header: Fill in a ngx_buf_t with the details of the
    header file.

 2. Generate XHTML table with file listing, in a memory buffer as
    autoindex does (and as I am doing right now). Chain it as next
    buffer of the one created in (1).

 3. Send custom footer: Fill in a ngx_buf_t with the details of the
    footer file. Chain it as next buffer of the one created (2).

Currently, for the buffers created in steps (1) and (3) I am filling
"buffer->file" with the file info values, setting "buffer->last" to
the length of the file and "buffer->in_file" to 1.

Can someone confirm that it is ok and Nginx will open and send the
file for me? (I will be experimenting myself in the meanwhile, too).

Also, will Nginx notice I filled in the "buffer->file" member and use
"sendfile()" if possible? (or any other method which the server will
consider "optimal").

Although I am aware my module will not be as fast as the built-in
autoindex module, I am trying to make it as efficient as possible, and
I have been reading portions of Nginx code to keep up with it -- and I
found it very clean and interesting to read, which I think is a Good
Thing(tm).

Thank you in advance, and for such a wonderful piece of software!


P.S. If someone is interested, I can publish the repository with the
code of module, it is BSD-licensed as Nginx.

-- 
Adrian Perez de Castro               <adrianperez at udc.es>
Oficina de Software Libre     http://softwarelibre.udc.es
Universidade da Coruña                  http://www.udc.es
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/attachments/20070906/12c6f965/attachment.pgp>