Question

I have an MVC 4 application with a button for taking a photo that opens up a new window with javascript which contains a silverlight application in it. The silverlight application can then take a photo using the webcam and store it as a Writeable Bitmap. What I would like to do is then push that bitmap onto an action in my controller for saving to the database and refreshing the view.

I know I need to send the image as a post to my controller, but any code examples or suggestions on how I would go about doing that would be greatly appreciated. I think it should work as follows, Button Click for saving the image in my silverlight application would call a POST to the MVC controller and attach the image stream as a parameter in the controller, and the controller can then take the stream and push it up to the database then I can close the silverlight window. Just not sure how to go about coding that.

Answer 1

You could send the image using a WebClient. Let’s suppose that you have the image inside your Silverlight application in a byte array:

byte[] image = ... get the image from your webcam
var client = new WebClient();
var uri = new Uri("http://example.com/photos/upload");
client.OpenWriteCompleted += (sender, e) =>
{
    var buffer = (byte[])e.UserState;
    e.Result.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
    e.Result.Close();
};
client.OpenWriteAsync(uri, "POST", image);

and on the MVC side:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Upload()
{
    byte[] image = new byte[Request.InputStream.Length];
    Request.InputStream.Read(image, 0, image.Length);
    // TODO: do something with the uploaded image here ...
}