I have created a website let's name it a.com. Now in this website (a.com) the users can upload an image that gets saved to a folder on remote server and the path is getting saved to database.
There is a second website (b.com) which has been hosted on the same server where the image needs to be retrieved.
Can we do this? If yes then please suggest some solution
Language Used = Asp.net 4.0 C#
Backend = SQL2008
It cane be done, if both website can access the remote folder. You need to use something like System.Net.WebClient to download image from remote server.
Since your using SQL and .Net im going to assume your using IIS aswell,
Creating a Virtual directory is probably your best bet, Easy to setup, easy to manage and Extremely handy to understand (if not vital)
http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/planning-your-iis-architecture/understanding-sites-applications-and-virtual-directories-on-iis
This is assuming you want to display the image in b.com, if you simply want to retrieve it you can do so by retrieving the path and using the image in any other way, you may need to set permissions on the image folder.
first of all both sites should use the same database to share information about images.
If I understand correctly b.com and the files are on the same server. If so put folder's virtual path to configuration.
After that, check database for new records. If found one, parse the name of the file and find it on the server.
As an example you get an image on a.com and insert it on database as
name="image.jpg"
b.com checks database for new records and finds image.jpg.
b.com reads configuration and finds
path="http://c.com/"
combines path and imagename
fulllink="http://c.com/image.jpg"
Related
I am having trouble accessing information on the server my website it on. As the website was originally programmed with VB.Net, I cannot change the language without having to completely reboot the website. The way the website and server are configured, I can only use ASP.Net and VB.Net.
I am needing to add a section where they can create folders, edit folder names, and upload pictures and text documents on the server through the public website. I tried using parts of the FileIO, Server, and Http that should have worked, but none of them did. Most of my research is about local files and text documents.
I have not been able to find any information that works. Can someone help me? Thank you.
Firstly, creating a virtual directory in ISS mapped to somewhere on your disk would be a good start. This way you have a separate folder for user data in a folder with write access (make sure IIS has write access to the folder!), and the folder is not affected by website deployments.
Secondly, you might need to resolve absolute path for most of the System.IO.File calls. See How to convert a relative path to an absolute path in a Windows application?, just you will need to convert this code to VB.
I've a classified ads system on ASP.NET/c#/MS SQL, and I'm trying to figure out where to store the images that people upload when placing an ad. The ad itself is being stored in a SQL server database.
The images are now being stored in a subfolder of my webapp. It seems to work fine, however I only recently discovered a big problem. Everytime a user deletes an ad, the attached images are to be deleted as well including the folder they reside in. This leads to a restart of the asp.net application. I searched internet and found that restarting the web-app is actually intended behaviour when a subfolder is being deleted.
Obviously, I need to fix this. But how to do that? Where can I store images in such a way that:
I can remove these images including the folders they are stored in?
I can acces them using a URL (the images need to be shown in the
webpages)
Without getting the web-app being
restarted?
Any feedback is appreciated!
Paul
See this question Deleting a directory results in application restart
An other alternative would be to store the images in the DB instead.
Another option would be to put the images in a directory completely unrelated to the web site then serve the images through a scripted page or handler. It would make all of your image urls look like mydomaincom/serveimage.aspx?imageid=323422, but unless you're counting on the name somewhere that really shouldn't matter much. Obviously it would require a modification to the page that serves the images in the first place as well, but if sub directories of this unrelated directory are deleted IIS really shouldn't care at all.
maybe you can store the images in SQL (check at the filestream feature in this case)
if not, I suppose you have somewhere in a business facade class, a service class or wherever you want, a methode "DeleteAd".
This method will have to do two things :
-delete the sql data
-delete the file image
also, you may change the image store to another folder, outside the web app. You will probably end with writing a custom handler (myhandler.ashx?fileid=XX) to serve the files, or a custom route and control if you use MVC.
I am working with two different web sites in asp.net. In the first project i upload some images to a specific folder under the project root and save just the filename in the database, now i am trying to display this images at some page of the second project I know the filename from the database and the image folder as absolute pat but I have not been able to display the image, even thought when looking in firebug the image src is correct src="D:/MyFolder/image.jpg" the image does not display, probably because it is not pointing in the right directory.
I have also tried using Server.MapPath and then my D location but still no success.
I am sure someone has faced the same situation before and was really hoping to get some hint to manage this.
Thank you in advance
I found my solution, strange but i didn't catch it before. Uploaded pictures under a project can always be accessed using the url of the project http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/photo.png now in the second project you can use reference the images using this url and concatenating the file name which i store on database. I think this is the best solution and without changing the code access security which i think can bring other problems with it. Anyway thank you guys.
If you want to display the image that is not in your project (I mean it is present in some other project or some other drive) just create the virtual directory in IIS
Go to "Run", type inetmgr
Right click on your project and add virtual directory
Give alias name and path so that it acts like folder in your project
I don't think you can serve files outside of your application path by default. It's called Code Access Security. You can read up on it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/930b76w0.aspx
You can fix this by changing your trust level to High in your web.config:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tkscy493.aspx
I wouldn't recommend doing this for any site that is externally accessible. In fact, depending on how/where you're hosting your application, this option may be restricted.
You can only "link" to files that exist relative to the same project or are hosted on another site via an absolute URL.
If you want to service files outside the application/website (on disk or in a database) you will need to build a mechanism that gets the file and binary writes it to the browser, setting the MIME type etc. This is best done using an HttpHandler.
What would be the best method to implement the following scenario:
The web site calls for a image gallery that has both private and public images to be stored. I've heard that you can either store them in a file hierarchy or a database. In a file hierarchy setup how would prevent direct access to the image. In a database setup access to the images would only be possible via the web page view. What would be a effective solution to pursue?
[Edit] Thanks all for the responses. I decided that the database route is the best option for this application since I do not have direct access to the server. Confined to a webroot folder. All the responses were most appreciated.
Having used both methods I'd say go with the database. If you store them on the filestore and they need protecting then you'd have to store them outside the web-root and then use a handler (like John mentions) to retrieve them, anyway. It's as easy to write a handler to stream them direct from database and you get a few advantages:
With database you don't need to worry about filestore permissions or generating unique filenames or folder hierarchies etc.
With database you can easily apply permissions and protection directly - no trying to work out who can view what based on paths etc.
With a database you can store the image and metadata all together - when you delete the metadata you delete the image - no possibility of orphaned records where you delete from database but not from filestore
Easier to back-up database and images and then restore
The disadvantage is that of performance, but you can use caching etc. to help with that. You can also use FILESTREAM storeage in SQL Server 2008 (and 05?) which means you get filesystem performance but via the DB:
"FILESTREAM integrates the SQL Server
Database Engine with an NTFS file
system by storing varbinary(max)
binary large object (BLOB) data as
files on the file system. Transact-SQL
statements can insert, update, query,
search, and back up FILESTREAM data.
Win32 file system interfaces provide
streaming access to the data.
FILESTREAM uses the NT system cache
for caching file data. This helps
reduce any effect that FILESTREAM data
might have on Database Engine
performance. The SQL Server buffer
pool is not used; therefore, this
memory is available for query
processing."
Using file hierarchy, you can put the files out of the website file folder, for example, suppose the web folder is c:/inetpub/wwwroot/somesite, put the file under c:/images/, so that the web users won't be able to access the image files. but you cannot use the direct link in your website neither, you need to create some procedure to read the file, return the stream.
personally I think it's better to put the file in the database, still create some procedure to retrieve the binary image data and return to wherever it needed.
In reality both scenarios are very similar, so it's up to you... Databases weren't designed to serve files, but if the size isn't really a concern for you, I don't see a problem with doing it.
To answer your question about direct access, you'd setup the file images the same way you would for the database: You'd use some sort of page (probably a .ashx handler) that serves the images, allowing you a layer of logic between the user and image to determine whether or not they should have access to it. The actual directory the images are located in would then need to either a) not be part of the directory structure in IIS or b) if it is part of IIS, only allow windows authenticated access, and only allow the account the application process is running under access to the directory.
If you're using IIS7, since .net jumps in the pipeline early I believe you can protect jpg files as well, just by using a role manager and applying roles to file system folders. If you're using IIS6, I've done something similar to the answer by John, where I store the actual file outside of the wwwroot, and use a handler to decide if the user has the correct credentials to view the image.
I would avoid the database unless you have a strong reason to do this - and I don't think a photo gallery is one of them.
Neither. Amazon S3 offers a very simple API for accepting uploads. You can use SimpleDB or your SQL database to track the URLs and permissions. Set the entire S3 bucket to private, and authenticate to it using your AWS key on the ASP.NET server.
Very little code is required to upload to S3, and very little more would be required to perform bookeeping in SQL.
Once they're in S3, grab the image resizer library and the S3 Reader plugin and you can have your entire system running in under an hour. And - it will scale properly. No disk or database space limits. Ever.
You can implement authorization using the AuthorizeImage event of the Image Resizer library. Just throw an AccessDeniedException if access isn't allowed for the current user.
If you want to tune performance a bit mare, add both the DiskCache and CloudFront plugins. CloudFront can edge-cache the public images (inexpensively), and DiskCache will handle the private images, serving them at static-file speeds.
Users of my web site will be able to upload a picture. This picture will land in /images/folder/picture.jpg. The question I have is: When running under VS2008, a form will insert a full row in a database column (sql server)and the picture will be uploaded to the folder. The result page will show the image. But when running the web server again later, the database will be ok but the image won't be there anymore since I guess that the local server each timer starts freshly with no content in the folder. I am new to uploading so I am wondering how you do to test this kind of thing.
Also, must the folder for the images be under /Content ? I am not sure where to put it and how it will transition when running under IIS ?
Thx
The ASP.NET development server does not clear the directory each time it starts. Have you verified the files are actually being written where you think they are? Seems like you've probably got some path issues and the files are possibly being written to the ASP.NET Temporary Files folder which may change from instance to instance.
I've have to test this with my local server to see exactly what it's doing with regard to the image that's being uploaded locally... but one thought is that instead of storing the picture on the file system, store it in the database itself.