php - Provide uploading files, write the file on hard disk, get full path (string) to add in database CakePHP
Since I am just experimenting on this, (only localhost) I may like to ask for some ideas(since nothing is really coming out of my mind) about letting a user, who is going to, for example, register to a mini-social-networking site, with a corresponding username/password, personal details, etc. I would upload the image, and save it to a folder(ON MY HARD DRIVE be it Drive C:\ or D:), for example '/images/username' and the full path of the folder would be the one inserted to a row named img_dir (of course it is a string, instead of putting it as a BLOB, so later i would just use img src="path"). I would not mind where it will be going to be saved. But since I am new to cakephp i haven't really grasped the idea of what I am going to do. I have no problems about registering/login sessions. This was easy in C# but I am too stupid for PHP maybe? :P
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Solution:
While this may not give you a direct solution in CakePHP, you had asked for some ideas.
I've outlines some pros and cons of storing a file on the filesystem (along with some other approaches) in this post.
Hope that helps...
Answer
Solution:
I've written a complete plugin for that kind of task and it's more thought through then just the idea of saving the file path.
A file has some more meta data like it's size and mime type which is useful when the file is served. So an uploaded file should be handled as an entity of it's own. I personally think it is a bad idea to directly save the path to a file within the record it belongs to. What happens if you need two images later? Adding incrementing fields like path1, path2?
It is IMO better to have a separate table for files and associate records with these file records. Expressed in CakePHP associations: User hasOne Avatar or Gallery hasMany Image for example.
Also saving files in path like this uploads\username1\pic.jpg can result in slowing down the app because of file system performance issues if you get a lot directories and files within the same level of the file system.
However, check my plugins readme.md out, there is more about why it does things like it does to solve different kinds of issues you can run into.