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From: "Mark Benussi" <mark_benussi@hotmail.com>
To: user@struts.apache.org
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Subject: RE: Where to store and how to retrieve Images for web app
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 14:22:54 +0000
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John,

I have also had this issue, and I can come at the problem from a different 
angle.

I allow users to upload images, and they get persisted to the file system 
under a directory in the Web App. A pointer to the image also gets placed in 
mysql.

I will be migrating to storing the data in Mysql and at application startup 
I will write the data out to the filesystem for my files that reference 
them. My main reason for doing this is that in deployment I don't want any 
environment specific content being overwritten, or even having to worry 
about it. I know that I can safely clear out the Webapp directory and I know 
that my database is backed up (And therefore so are the images).

As a second point I would be interested to know if anyone has any code 
snippets to persist (Create and Read) the data to MySQl.


----Original Message Follows----
From: john.chesher@convergys.com
Reply-To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <user@struts.apache.org>
To: "Struts Users Mailing List" <user@struts.apache.org>
Subject: Where to store and how to retrieve Images for web app
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:23:05 -0500


My web app will have about 300 users, each of whom will be allowed to
upload a max of 5 images/digital pictures.  I am using the Struts-upload
package.  I considered storing the images in MySQL as blobs, but have read
lots of advice that this is more trouble than it's worth / overkill.
However, I am perplexed (I am a newbie) as to where I should store them on
the file system and then how I would retrieve them and get them displayed
in a browser.  What is a "best practice" for this?

It would be easy to store them in a subdirectory of the web app, which
would allow me to include them in my JSPs with a simple HREF tag.  However,
does this cause problems with the size of the web app, maybe the start-up
and reload speeds of the container, etc.?  I trialed this by storing 1500
images in myWebApp/Pictures, starting Tomcat and retrieving images with a
HREF tag in a JSP.  I didn't notice any impact on startup time or
performance, but I want to make sure I'm not missing some other problem...

If I store them in the filesystem outside of the web app directory
structure, I can't just refer to them in my JSPs with an HREF tag, right?
It would be more work to have an action servlet retrieve the image file and
return it to the browser in the response object.  That seems to be just as
much work as storing them in MySQL, so why not just use MySQL?   What are
your opinions?


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