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mikes0011
Brainy
July 21, 2021
Question

Anyone have any tricks for dealing with Very Large Files?

  • July 21, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 0 views

A process generated (as requested) a 3.7 gigabyte zip file last night.  For the size it worked pretty well.  I did notice something funny though; there seems to be no way to display its size correctly, other than downloading it to my local system.

The filesize-in-bytes (~3.7 billion) is well past the integer overflow point (~2 billion).  When I view the file's properties directly in designer, it shows a *negative* filesize:

When I click into the document properties, I see the same thing.

When calling the "document" function on the file directly, I see a corresponding negative integer (i assume this somehow corresponds to the integer overflow, but I can never keep it straight in my head) --

In this case it's not critical.  However I can imagine future use cases where not being able to internally pull an accurate file size could be a big deal.  Has anyone developed any neat tricks and/or workarounds for this?  ( I mean other than the obvious, "why on earth are you allowing Appian to generate a zip file over 3 gigabytes", which is a good question for a different conversation ;-) )

3 replies

gayathris111098
July 22, 2021
stewart.burchell
July 22, 2021

Why on earth ARE you generating a 3GB Zip File? [emoticon:4191f5ee34e248a29fa0dbe8d975f74a]

Why are you generating a file at all (i.e. why not bring users to the data rather than data to the users)?

mikes0011
mikes0011Author
Brainy
July 22, 2021
i.e. why not bring users to the data

Come on, you should already know that the venn diagram between "reasonable/logical solutions" and "stakeholder requirements" only has the thinnest sliver of overlap ;-)

In this case there's a recently-new requirement to (on demand, but not in real-time) take a total export comprising all system-resident files of a certain subset of system-side "types" (i.e. different certs, etc), for a group of just over 1,000 users, per contractual details.  The implementation wasn't really up for discussion beyond a certain point.  I (at least) enforced the idea that it would run only at 2 AM and can only be run up to once per day.

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