Question

I’m developing a webapp where the user is given the chance to upload his resume in pdf format. I’m using NHibernate as a data mapper and MS SQL SERVER 2005.

I want to be able to save the .pdf file to a given table… any ideas?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

We are doing exactly that with the ‘original’ Java Hibernate3. You just map a byte array property of your persistable class to an column of Type ‘image’.

package com.hibernate.pdf.sample;  public class TPDFDocument implements java.io.Serializable {           private Integer pdfDocumentId;         private byte[] document;           public Integer getPdfDocumentId() {             return this.pdfDocumentId;         }          public void setPdfDocumentId(Integer pdfDocumentId) {             this.pdfDocumentId = pdfDocumentId;         }          public byte[] getDocument() {             return this.document;         }          public void setDocument(byte[] document) {             this.document = document;         }  } 

Hibernate Mapping:

<hibernate-mapping>     <class name='com.hibernate.pdf.sample.TPDFDocument' table='T_PDFDocument'>         <id name='pdfDocumentId' type='integer'>             <column name='pdfDocumentId' />             <generator class='identity' />         </id>         <property name='document' type='binary'>             <column name='document' not-null='true' />         </property>     </class> </hibernate-mapping> 

Table creation:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[T_PDFDocument](     [pdfDocumentId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [document] [image] NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_PDFDocument] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED  (     [pdfDocumentId] ASC ) 

All you have to do is to read the documents raw bytes into the array and persist it. In our situation the documents will get hardly larger than 1MB , so putting the whole thing into the byte-array won’t cause performance issues. Maybe this solution isn’t feasable for very large documents.

I guess with NHibernate implementation and C# the solution will look very similar.