Question

I have 2 different project. One is supposed to upload images (admin) and the other is supposed to show them.

I was writing something like “/Contents/images/image path”… But wait! I will I upload the images from the application into that address?

Any help and suggestions please.

Answer 1

If you have two applications that will interact with the same files, it’s probably better to have an ImageController with an action that allows you to upload/download the image rather than storing them directly as content. That way both applications can reference the same file location or images stored in a database and manipulate them. Your download action would simply use a FileContentResult to deliver the bytes from the file. You can derive the content type from the file extension.

Example using a database. Note that I assume that the database table contains the content type as determined at upload time. You could also use a hybrid approach that stores the image metadata in a database and loads the actual file from a file store.

 public class ImageController : Controller
 {

      public ActionResult Get( int id )
      {
           var context = new MyDataContext();
           var image = context.Images.SingleOrDefault( i => i.ID == id );
           if (image != null)
           {
               return File( image.Content, image.ContentType );
           }
           // or you could return a placeholder image here if appropriate.
           throw new HttpException( 404, "The image does not exist" );
      }
 }

An alternative would be to incorporate your administrative interface in an area of the same application rather than in a separate project. This way you could reuse the content/images directory if you wanted. I find that when you have dynamic images the database or a hybrid approach works better from a programming perspective since it’s more consistent with the rest of your data model.