Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 4 app that i want to deploy to Windows Azure. A part of this app involves uploading a picture. When the picture is uploaded, I want to store the picture in a directory located at /pictures/uploaded.

My question is, how do I upload a picture to a relative path within my app hosted on Windows Azure? Up to this point, my app has been hosted in a Virtual Machine. I was able to do the above by using the following:

string path = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["rootWebDirectory"] + "/pictures/uploaded;

// Get the file path
if (Directory.Exists(path) == false)
  Directory.CreateDirectory(path);

string filePath = path + "/uploaded" + DateTime.UtcNow.Milliseconds + ".png";
filePath = filePath.Replace("/", "\\").Replace("\\\\", "\\");

// Write the picture to the file system
byte[] bytes = GetPictureBytes();
using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(filePath, FileMode.Create))
{
  fileStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
  fileStream.Flush();
  fileStream.Close();
}

Currently, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["rootWebDirectory"] points to an absolute path. I belive this is where my problem lies. I can’t figure out how to switch all of this to a relative path.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Data and images are not meant to be stored in website directory. That’s why there is the Azure Blob Storage.

Azure works by copying the website out to an instance, so if more than one instance exists then uploaded images (which are stored local to the instance) will become out of sync, you will even loose images if there are conflicts.

If you really want to do it the line below will give you what you want:

string path = Server.MapPath("~/pictures/uploaded");