Files Storing!! Which is best (blob or link to file)??

[ahmad]

Hi there,

We are planning to develop different solutions which allows to store the images and all other kind of digital media (like audio, video, documents (word, excel, pdf, zip etc..) )

Just in dilemma to decide how to store them.

Question 1:

Which would be the better way?? To store all these kind of digital media in Media field or store the files in a seperate folders and give the links to the file??

Question 2:

Would there be any performance issue if we use media fields to store heavy files?? How fast a 50MB file would be loaded into a blob field from outside the local area network??

Your answers will be really helpful

Thanks
Ahmad

[Jan Blok]

1) blob field is less vulnerable to errors, the file cannot be lost
2) streaming a file via al link from the server is more efficient than using a blob (if the files are bigger than several MB's)

[idoctor]

I wrote an application that tracks hundreds of thoasands of JPEG and PDF applications in filemaker. I had to use links to the files in this situation. I have rewritten in Servoy using MS SQL as the backend. The coding is much more complex if you keep the individual files in a backend database.

John McCann

[idoctor]

To clarify my own comment. The coding is much more complex if you keep the individual files on a file server. It is much less complex if you keep the files in a backend database.

John McCann

[janber]

I was wondering what kind of path one should use to open a file on say an X Server.
I ran different tries ; like

afp:/at/....
ip:192.168...

Nothing seems to work

[Jan Blok]

open within where?

[janber]

Well actually I found the answer;

In fact we have an existing application that scans and stores documents (contracts) on an OS X file server in pdf format

All client computers have access to the file server

To open the corresponding contract from the Servoy application the filename path in Os X is

/Volumes/name_of_remote_disk/name_of_folder/filename

code is

application.executeProgram("open", /Volumes/name_of_remote_disk/name_of_folder/filename);