Using KIO to retrive HTTP Headers [GSoC student help request]

[Aish Raj Dahal]

Respected members of the KDE community,

I am a Google Summer of Student working in the integration of Metalink
HTTP [RFC 6249] in KDE's KGet Download manager.

My work involves in retrieval of HTTP header response from the server
and processing of the headers for download information. So, far
although I have been able to capture the HTTP header responses from
the server,  there is an issue with large files.

The issue is that KIO attempts to download the entire file before
being able to query for its HTTP header responses. This behavior may
be taken lightly for smaller files, however for larger files
downloading an entire file, just to get the HTTP header response
associated with it seems to be impractical.

I will be thankful to you if you could kindly help me in finding a way
in which I'm able to get the header response without downloading the
entire file. In this process please note that the redirection has to
disabled.

As a possible solution to the problem, since, a Metalink header
response has the content type "text/html", I have tried using the
mimetype signal  received during a header response with the KIO::Job ,
but it seems to be ineffective, for some reason. I'd be really
thankful if you could help me in implementing this approach.

Lastly, my development repository is located on Github at
https://github.com/ardahal/kio-learner . The branch "master" contains
my efforts to use the mimetype in solving the problem, whereas the
branch "experimental" contains the original (stable) version which
needs to download an entire file before querying the HTTP header
response.

Last but not the least, thank you very much in taking interest in
reading this email, I hope to have your wholehearted support and
guidance in helping me solve the problem, as my Summer of Code project
fully depends on it.

Thank You very much.

Regards
Aish R Dahal
Google Summer of Code Student 2012
Metalink / KGet