(Rails) Uploading Directories - ruby-on-rails

I need to upload multiple files on my website.
But I need not just a form for uploading multiple files, I need to upload whole directories.
How's this possible for the minimalist?
Yours, Joern.

According to my somewhat limited knowledge this is not possible, only file transfer is possible, not directories.
Here are some workarounds, based on discussion on Velocity Reviews and another discussion:
upload a zip, which you unzip at the server side
upload directories over ftp (web page can be a front end to this)
upload files one by one
I would go either for zip or ftp. Note: someone might have produced a gem that enables uploading directories (I know nothing of such thing, but I will be happy to find out, if there is).

Adding another option to the list provided by Sorrow:
upload via REST/JSON
OK, this is a partial solution, but it does give you the opportunity to write a script that reads your directory and POSTS to your website.

Related

iOS:How to check if an directory already exists on the FTP server while uploading?

I am working on an App, in which I want to upload images and pdf to the FTP server. I am using this reference ref.All is working good. The images and pdf are getting uploaded on the server with proper names and sizes.
But, now I want to check if the directory is already exists on the server or not. I am not able to get it to work with this library.
So my question is that how to check directory on ftp,if directory is there then upload the files if not then first create directory on ftp and then upload files onto that directory?
Any Ideas.. ? Any help will be appreciated.
Different FTP servers will answer the LIST request in differing ways, so there is no single answer to this question. RFC959 says on the matter:
Since the information on a file may vary widely from system
to system, this information may be hard to use automatically
in a program, but may be quite useful to a human user.
Using the CWD request to change into the directory in question, and detecting a successful response will detect the directory, however that leaves you in that directory as a potentially unrequired side effect.
For these reasons, as well as others, you may find more modern protocols such as SSH (which includes a file transfer feature) to be more useful. You may find the DLSFTPClient CocoaPod useful.
M.

Scan directory for file names in MVC

I'm developing a MVC5 web app, hosted through azure, that lets you manage your movies (it's just for myself at the moment). I'm trying to find a way to scan a local folder on the users pc for a list of file names. I do realise the security/permissions issues I might run into. I do not need the file uploaded, only the full file name.
It would work by the user being able to select a folder where they store their movies and it will take in all the file names, including the ones in any sub directories.
I tried a multiple file upload form but quickly ran into issues with the max request limit which I tried messing around with but it proved redundant in the end. I can settle for the user selecting multiple files but would rather it done the directory way.
I know this might prove impossible in the end but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rails File Upload - Scan files; and separate folders for each user

Does Paperclip scans the files for errors, malicious software, viruses before uploading to database? If no, what are the viable solutions.
And, is it better to first create a separate folder for each user before they upload files and store in their respective folders? What are the merits and demerits of it? Is it possible to specify this with Paperclip?
Thanks
Re viruses etc, this might be useful - Rails / Heroku - How to anti-virus scan uploaded file?
Re storing each user's files in a seperate folder: the conventional way would be to store every FILE in a separate folder, and then link the files to the user via the database (eg a user_id field on the file records). As far as merits and demerits go, besides it not being conventional, one thing to bear in mind would be that if a user's files are stored in a single folder, then if they upload a two files with the same name then the second would overwrite the first (unless of course you put them in separate folders within the user's folder). This could be a good thing or bad thing depending on your requirements.
BTW - a slightly pedantic note: files aren't uploaded to the database (at least not normally) - they are uploaded to a filesystem, and a corresponding record is created in the database. The files don't go into the database (as i say, usually: it is possible to store files as blobs in the DB but it's not good practise and not usual).

Download FTP directory contents to ios

I have a website, let's say it's "http://www.jwilkthings.com/stuff"
I have a bunch of .txt files stored on this website, i.e. "http://www.jwilkthings.com/stuff/text1.txt"
What I'm wanting to do is find a way in iOS to download all of those text files without knowing what the document name is. I can already retrieve them manually as long as I have a file name, but I would rather just get all of them at once and put them in the documents directory if possible. I currently use FileZilla to upload all of the text files, so I can use FTP if needed.
The correct way to solve this problem is to not use FTP (riddled with performance and security issues), and to configure your web server to expose a table of contents directory listing that your client can parse.
But that's not an answer to your question.
If you really want your iOS app to speak FTP, take a look at the SimpleFTP sample project from Apple.
It's old, but I just got it to build on iOS 5. The ListController.m file has the code you're looking for.

Recommendations for file server to be used with Rails application

I'm working on a Rails app that accepts file uploads and where users can modify these files later. For example, they can change the text file contents or perform basic manipulations on images such as resizing, cropping, rotating etc.
At the moment the files are stored on the same server where Apache is running with Passenger to serve all application requests.
I need to move user files to dedicated server to distribute the load on my setup. At the moment our users upload around 10GB of files in a week, which is not huge amount but eventually it adds up.
And so i'm going through a different options on how to implement the communication between application server(s) and a file server. I'd like to start out with a simple and fool-proof solution. If it scales well later across multiple file servers, i'd be more than happy.
Here are some different options i've been investigating:
Amazon S3. I find it a bit difficult to implement for my application. It adds complexity of "uploading" the uploaded file again (possibly multiple times later), please mind that users can modify files and images with my app. Other than that, it would be nice "set it and forget it" solution.
Some sort of simple RPC server that lives on file server and transparently manages files when looking from the application server side. I haven't been able to find any standard and well tested tools here yet so this is a bit more theorethical in my mind. However, the Bert and Ernie built and used in GitHub seem interesting but maybe too complex just to start out.
MogileFS also seems interesting. Haven't seen it in use (but that's my problem :).
So i'm looking for different (and possibly standards-based) approaches how file servers for web applications are implemented and how they have been working in the wild.
Use S3. It is inexpensive, a-la-carte, and if people start downloading their files, your server won't have to get stressed because your download pages can point directly to the S3 URL of the uploaded file.
"Pedro" has a nice sample application that works with S3 at github.com.
Clone the application ( git clone git://github.com/pedro/paperclip-on-heroku.git )
Make sure that you have the right_aws gem installed.
Put your Amazon S3 credentials (API & secret) into config/s3.yml
Install the Firefox S3 plugin (http://www.s3fox.net/)
Go into Firefox S3 plugin and put in your api & secret.
Use the S3 plugin to create a bucket with a unique name, perhaps 'your-paperclip-demo'.
Edit app/models/user.rb, and put your bucket name on the second last line (:bucket => 'your-paperclip-demo').
Fire up your server locally and upload some files to your local app. You'll see from the S3 plugin that the file was uploaded to Amazon S3 in your new bucket.
I'm usually terribly incompetent or unlucky at getting these kinds of things working, but with Pedro's little S3 upload application I was successful. Good luck.
you could also try and compile a version of Dropbox (they provide the source) and ln -s that to your public/system directory so paperclip saves to it. this way you can access the files remotely from any desktop as well... I haven't done this yet so i can't attest to how easy/hard/valuable it is but it's on my teux deux list... :)
I think S3 is your best bet. With a plugin like Paperclip it's really very easy to add to a Rails application, and not having to worry about scaling it will save on headaches.

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