Storing some small (under 1MB) files with MongoDB in NodeJS WITHOUT GridFS

Question

I run a website that runs on a backend of nodeJS + mongoDB. Right now, I\'m implementing a system to store some icons (small image files) that will need to be in the databas

Answer 1

I have been looking for the same thing. I know this post is old , but perhaps i can help someone out there.

var fs = require('fs');
var mongo = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
var Binary = require('mongodb').Binary;

var archivobin = fs.readFileSync("vc.exe"); 
// print it out so you can check that the file is loaded correctly
console.log("Loading file");
console.log(archivobin);

var invoice = {};
invoice.bin = Binary(archivobin);

console.log("largo de invoice.bin= "+ invoice.bin.length());
// set an ID for the document for easy retrieval
invoice._id = 12345; 
  mongo.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017/nogrid', function(err, db) {
  if(err) console.log(err);
     db.collection('invoices').insert(invoice, function(err, doc){
    if(err) console.log(err);
  // check the inserted document
    console.log("Inserting file");
    console.log(doc);

    db.collection('invoices').findOne({_id : 12345}, function(err, doc){
      if (err) {
        console.error(err);
        }

      fs.writeFile('vcout.exe', doc.bin.buffer, function(err){
          if (err) throw err;
          console.log('Sucessfully saved!');
    });

    });
  });
});

Answer 2

If your images truly are small enough to not be a problem with document size and you don't mind a little amount of extra processing, then it's probably fine to just store it directly in your collection. To do that you'll want to base64 encode the image, then store it using mongo's BinData type. As I understand it, that will then save it as a BSON bit array, not actually store the base64 string, so the size won't grow larger than your original binary image.

It will display in json queries as a base64 string, which you can use to get the binary image back.