Question

I have a project where a user for the company will use a winform HTML editor to put some text and pictures in for specific customers. The customers will be looking at this information on a website.

What’s the best way to handle this? If it was strictly HTML text then I could save everything in the database and not have any problems displaying it. But the employee wants the ability to show pictures…

---

1. Do I save the pictures as a file in some public place so that the website and the winform program can see it? The problem here would be where is the best public place to store the pictures. The webserver will be a locked down server with no one having access. Can I get the file from a non-local directory from ASP.Net?

2. Do I save the pictures in the database and make the program smart enough to replace the image source tags with the picture from the database? I thought this might get difficult (definitely on the web… if someone suggests this, can you give me some C# examples on how to do this on the winform and web?)

I know someone else had to do this somewhere and succeeded…

Answer 1

I would suggest using a database to store a path to a local image (if this is possible on your setup)

EG the physical image will be saved in a path like the following:

/App_Themes/Web/images/userfiles/YOURIMAGENAME.jpg

and just save the following in the database

YOURIMAGENAME.jpg

This would then mean that you could have somthing like the following:

<asp:Image ID="imgImage" runat="sever" />

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    //Your data-access code here

    //image.ImageName is provided by your data access code.
    imgImage.ImageUrl = string.Format("/App_Themes/Web/images/userfiles/{0}", image.ImageName)
}