Question

Hie guys i am still learning cakephp so this question might be easy but im struggling. I have a view.ctp that is currently displaying a buyer’s profile like personal details, in addition to this i also want it to display a profile picture for the buyer as well. I have a field in the buyers table called prof_pic which is using longblob data type. I can view the profile of the logged buyer, now i want them to view their profile picture and the personal details as well. How do i do this? Thank you

Answer 1

You should consider saving your files in the filesystem instead of the database. Florian Krämer from CakeDC did a nice writeup of why to do this. In short:

Storing files in the database is in nearly all cases a bad solution
because when you get the file it has to go its way through the
database connection, which can, specially on servers that are not in
the same network, cause performance problems.

Advantages of storage in the file system:

1. Easy and direct file access, to parse them (csv, xml…) or manipulate them (images)
2. You don’t need to install any additional software to manage them
3. Easy to move and mount on other machines
4. Smaller then stored in a DB

He started an interesting implementation of a plugin to do this. It makes use of the Gaufrette filesystem abstraction layer and makes working with files in Cake much cleaner. A way to scale Images to your needs with the Imagine plugin is also already provided and you’re even able to host your images on Amazon S3 and the likes if you’re running a high traffic site.