I have a directory that contains a csv file and avatar images.
The contents of csv file are as
Id Name Avatar Dept School
1 Mark 01019.jpg Market None
2 John 21122.jpg Business None
3 Sam 33311.jpg IT None
....
....
50 James 9823.jpg IT USA
The avatar images are placed in the same folder of csv file.
What I want is that when a user uploads csv file, then the info in file is converted into business objects, say Person. I can upload and parse the csv to get Id, Name, Dept, School, but ofcourse cant make it upload avatar images (in the csv file) to server, in same web request.
What are the possible ways to achieve this? Assume that I want to avoid zipping all images+csv in a single .zip file and then upload it on server.
Thanks.
I just love when people end their question by excluding the only possible solution.
The server (where your web application is running) has no direct access to the client (where the files are). The only thing the server can work with is what the client chooses to give it. So, your option is to have the user upload each image file invidually, along with the CSV, or to zip it all up, so they can send everything in a single upload. That's it. Period. At least with a standard web page.
You can of course create a Java applet or a Flash application that the user would authorize to access their filesystem to retrieve the necessary files. Essentially, the process is still the same, it's just the Java/Flash app would automatically do the file uploads instead of requiring the user to manually do them. However, both Java (on the web) and Flash are all but dead technologies at this point, so by using either of those, you're creating a dependency on something that is constantly exploited and not guaranteed to continue to receive security patches for the life of your application. Flash, in particular, has already been end-of-lifed, so Adobe will abandon support entirely within the next few years, max.
Long and short, tell your user to zip it up and upload a zip file.
Related
I'm working on an intranet for a school, I would like to set up online folders for students, some kind of Google Drive-ish folder, one for each class.
So far, I managed to create it, but I would like to add some improvements.
Basically, each Class has many Resources, and each Resource has an attached file (with Paperclip). So, for now, I'm using Dropzone, and each time a student uplaods a file, it works just fine, but other student have to refresh to see the file.
I was wondering if there was a way to upload resources in real-time, so that everytime a student uploads a file, all other students can see it appear as soon as it is uploaded.
I searched for a bit, on one hand, I have the Publish/Subscribe which appears to bring some kind of realtime, but only for messengers-like applications, and on the other hand, I got some gems, like Remotipart, which allow to upload files asynchronously.
Is there a way to combine both ?
I'm using RoR 4
By using Remotipart, only the student who uploads the document can see the uploaded data & no other students can see it. You can do a patch by polling.Hit a Ajax request after few seconds which will fetch the data from the server & append it on the HTML
We want to save documents to individual OneDrive Folders.
Currently:
User "Tim" generates a customer overview (Last visits, Revenue etc.) in our ERP-Sytem from Customer "TomCompany" and it will be automatically saved in an FTP-Folder. He's now able to have a look on this file at customers site with Good Reader on his iPad.
Plan:
First step: The customer overview should be saved directly to OneDrive, instead of an FTP-Folder.
Second step: Every Sales Person has his own OneDrive account, so it should be saved to his own account with user-Parameters etc. (which is not a Problem to manage in our ERP-API).
The question is: Is it possible to connect to OneDrive from a different System like ERP. "SaveFileToOneDrive with Authentication"
You can 'connect' to OneDrive through the given API with JavaScript.
Here is an example: https://dev.onedrive.com/sdk/js-v7/js-picker-save.htm .
You can now add the 'Save to OneDrive' button on every page you need it.
If not noticed yet, some examples for the API: https://dev.onedrive.com/sample-code.htm
Hope this helps you to solve your (for me still unknown) problem ;-)
I implemented own windows live API because of I found some problems with standard live api. It is based on REST API so there is layer with objects (file, folder, etc...) and each object has some equipment (i.e. file has method for upload and download file). Second layer is for communication with server side and object layer send requests into second layer which send it into server. Server sends response and second layer return this response into object layer.
I implemented onedrive function mainly because of I developed application which uploads some files into onedrive.
So it is very simple to use it. I describe it on webpage https://wlivefw.codeplex.com/
You can sign as user which onedrive want to use by connection object. Then you will need folder id where you want to create new file. Then you create file object with parent_id set to folder id, name (is required) and description (optional). And now you call File.Create(file object which you created, Stream object - data of origin file, OverWriteOption - if you want to overwrite file if exists or not or create with new name, and progress handler - delegate to method which you want to invoke when progress changed).
File uploading is implemented by BITS protocol, so you can upload file greater than 60MB. File is uploaded by fragment so if fragment uploading fails you can very easy send this fragment again - in exception when uploading fails is delegate to continue method which continue upload from last successfull fragment.
I would like to improve this library so library is free to use as well as source code. Please if you will expand this library send me your changes and I will build new version, etc... Thank you and I hope it is usefull.
In my application, I have a textarea input where users can type a note.
When they click Save, there is an AJAX call to Web Api that saves the note to the database.
I would like for users to be able to attach multiple files to this note (Gmail style) before saving the Note. It would be nice if the upload could start as soon as attached, before saving the note.
What is the best strategy for this?
P.S. I can't use jQuery fineuploader plugin or anything like that because I need to give the files unique names on the server before uploading them to Azure.
Is what I'm trying to do possible, or do I have to make the whole 'Note' a normal form post instead of an API call?
Thanks!
This approach is file-based, but you can apply the same logic to Azure Blob Storage containers if you wish.
What I normally do is give the user a unique GUID when they GET the AddNote page. I create a folder called:
C:\TemporaryUploads\UNIQUE-USER-GUID\
Then any files the user uploads at this stage get assigned to this folder:
C:\TemporaryUploads\UNIQUE-USER-GUID\file1.txt
C:\TemporaryUploads\UNIQUE-USER-GUID\file2.txt
C:\TemporaryUploads\UNIQUE-USER-GUID\file3.txt
When the user does a POST and I have confirmed that all validation has passed, I simply copy the files to the completed folder, with the newly generated note ID:
C:\NodeUploads\Note-100001\file1.txt
Then delete the C:\TemporaryUploads\UNIQUE-USER-GUID folder
Cleaning Up
Now. That's all well and good for users who actually go ahead and save a note, but what about the ones who uploaded a file and closed the browser? There are two options at this stage:
Have a background service clean up these files on a scheduled basis. Daily, weekly, etc. This should be a job for Azure's Web Jobs
Clean up the old files via the web app each time a new note is saved. Not a great approach as you're doing File IO when there are potentially no files to delete
Building on RGraham's answer, here's another approach you could take:
Create a blob container for storing note attachments. Let's call it note-attachments.
When the user comes to the screen of creating a note, assign a GUID to the note.
When user uploads the file, you just prefix the file name with this note id. So if a user uploads a file say file1.txt, it gets saved into blob storage as note-attachments/{note id}/file1.txt.
Depending on your requirement, once you save the note, you may move this blob to another blob container or keep it here only. Since the blob has note id in its name, searching for attachments for a note is easy.
For uploading files, I would recommend doing it directly from the browser to blob storage making use of AJAX, CORS and Shared Access Signature. This way you will avoid data going through your servers. You may find these blog posts useful:
Revisiting Windows Azure Shared Access Signature
Windows Azure Storage and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) – Lets Have Some Fun
I've been researching the best way to implement an application for my brother's business, and have been pretty stumped in terms of how to structure my application. The application will be run on iPad 2's deployed in the field, sometimes without readily available network access (due to spotty cell coverage in the area).
Here is the abstract on what it needs to do:
1) Load a template PDF file (its a contract to sign up for what is basically cable service) that has editable fields, such as:
a) Name b) Street address c) Dates
2) be able to collect a drawn signature (very similar to any credit card app, such as Square, etc), which is then overlaid onto the PDF.
3) Save the PDF, containing drawn signature and other edited fields, as a new file. Then, upload it to a backend server, using the name of the individual and date/time as meta data for sorting into specific folders.
Without this third aspect, an employee would have to spend 30 minutes to 2 hours a day categorizing all of the app submissions, so step number 3 is a pretty important aspect to the development, even though most of the work is outside the realm of objective C. Still, i need to send the PDF file off with as much information attached to it as I can...
I'd appreciate any guidance related to the best course of action in developing this. Are there any open source applications that you guys know of that I can reference to? I have searched Apple's Developer member center and Google to no avail.
How could i implement iText properly here? Is that even the best option?? It does digital signatures as opposed to those drawn with UI Kit...
Sounds like you should have a web service with a database for storing the meta information and the path to the generated PDF with the signature and other entries.
Your app would essentially generate the PDF, make a web service call and insert information such as the client's name, date/time, whatever else you want, and then the name or path of the PDF file. The PDF file would subsequently be uploaded to a designated location with a unique file name to prevent overwriting another PDF. You could formulate the name of the file off of the corresponding Key/Id of the record in the database or you could use a GUID as the filename and for good measure concatenate the EPOCH timestamp when the file was generated. Both approaches should guarantee filename uniqueness. Another possible file name scheme Device UUID+epoch timestamp, many options available.
If you have to actually edit the PDFs, it sounds like a pretty hard requirement. Another approach would be to show the user what they need to see (ie what they have to sign) and then generate the PDF with the signature and fields populated. Since you want to upload it anyway you would probably save yourself headaches if you offload this from the iPad and do it using a remote server (as Chris suggested) generating the PDF as you need it. I've been involved in helping out an iPad app development doing property inspections - it used Docmosis to do the document generation in preview and then in submitted forms. Hope that helps even though it's a few months down the track.
Im desiging an app which allows users to upload images (max 500k per image, roughly 20 images) from their hard drive to the site so as to be able to make some custom boardgames (e.g. snakes and ladders) in pdf formate. These will be created with prawn instantly and then made available for instant download.
Neither the images uploaded nor the pdfs created need to be saved on my apps side permanently. The moment the user downloads the pdf they are no longer needed.
Heroku doesn't support saving files to the system (it does allow to the tmp directory but says you shouldnt rely on it striking it out for me). I'm wondering what tools / services I should be looking into to get round this. Ive looked into paperclip, I'm wondering if this is right for this type of job.
Paperclip is on the right track, but the key insight is you need to use the S3 storage backend (Paperclip uses the FS by default which as you've noticed is no good on Heroku). It's pretty handy; instead of flushing writes out to the file system, it uses the AWS::S3 gem to upload them to S3. You can read more about it in the rdoc here: http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/blob/master/lib/paperclip/storage/s3.rb
Here's how the flow would work:
I'd let your users upload their multiple source images. Here's an article on allowing multiple attachments to one model with paperclip: http://www.cordinc.com/blog/2009/04/multiple-attachments-with-vali.html.
Then when you're ready to generate the PDF (probably in a background job, right?), what you do is download all the source images to somewhere in tmp/ (make sure the directory is based on your model id or something so if two people do this at once, the files don't get stepped on). Once you've got all the images downloaded, you can generate your PDF. I know this is using the file system, but as long as you do all your filesystem interactions in one request or job cycle, it will work, your files will still be there. I use this method in a couple production web apps. You can't count on tmp/ being there between requests, but within one it's reliably there.
Storing your generated PDF on S3 with paperclip makes sense too, since then you can just hand your users the S3 URL. If you want you can make something to clear the files off every so often if you don't want to pay the S3 costs, but they should be trivial.
Paperclip sounds like an ideal candidate. It will save images in RAILS_ROOT/public/system/, which is both persistent and private (shouldn't be able to be enumerated on shared hosting).
You can configure it to produce thumbnails of your images if you wish.
And it can remove the images it manages when the associated model is destroyed - after your user downloads their PDF, and you delete the record from the database.
Prawn might not be appropriate, depending on the complexity of the PDFs you need to generate. If you have $$$, go for PrinceXML and the princely gem. I've had some success with wkhtmltopdf, which generates PDFs from a Webkit render of HTML/CSS - but it doesn't support any of the advanced page manipulation stuff that Prince does.