Rails Binary Stream support

Question

I\'m going to be starting a project soon that requires support for large-ish binary files. I\'d like to use Ruby on Rails for the webapp, but I\'m concerned with the BLOB su

Answer 1

+1 for attachment_fu

I use attachment_fu in one of my apps and MUST store files in the DB (for annoying reasons which are outside the scope of this convo).

The (one?) tricky thing dealing w/BLOB's I've found is that you need a separate code path to send the data to the user -- you can't simply in-line a path on the filesystem like you would if it was a plain-Jane file.

e.g. if you're storing avatar information, you can't simply do:

<%= image_tag @youruser.avatar.path %>

you have to write some wrapper logic and use send_data, e.g. (below is JUST an example w/attachment_fu, in practice you'd need to DRY this up)

send_data(@youruser.avatar.current_data, :type => @youruser.avatar.content_type, :filename => @youruser.avatar.filename, :disposition => 'inline' )

Unfortunately, as far as I know attachment_fu (I don't have the latest version) does not do clever wrapping for you -- you've gotta write it yourself.

P.S. Seeing your question edit - Attachment_fu handles all that annoying stuff that you mention -- about needing to know file paths and all that crap -- EXCEPT the one little issue when storing in the DB. Give it a try; it's the standard for rails apps. IF you insist on re-inventing the wheel, the source code for attachment_fu should document most of the gotchas, too!