showing images from mysql errors

bliss322

hi all,

i'm tring to present an image that is stored as a longBLOB in mysql.

i've looked around and found existing code that i've tried out... the problems are, it either shows the binary data instead of the image; or, when i put in the two "header" lines, it tries to either download the page OR it still shows the image in binary data.

help??

thanks

code sample:

Header("Content-type: $user->filetype");
Header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=$user->filename");

//verified the variables existed
// filename is "winter.jpg" .... filetype is "image/pjpeg"
//echo $user->filename;
//echo $user->filetype;

//this is the BLOB variable
echo $user->adImage." ";
echo " ";

yelvington

Why did you think it would work to intermingle binary image data with HTML?

bliss322

because of this article::

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/florian19991014.php3?page=3

yelvington

You appear to have set the header correctly, but what you're subsequently sending makes no sense. You have placed (presumably valid) binary data in an output stream that mingles it with with text/html markup:

echo $user->adImage." ";
echo " ";

If you're going to output binary data, you have to be very, very careful not to include any spurious textual data, not even a blank space, as the result will not conform to the standard format of an image and will be a corrupt object from the browser's point of view.

bliss322

sooo,

should i change that one echo statement and remove the

OR,

are you saying i can't have ANY text after this binary data... because, if that's the case, then I need a different solution.

the whole point of this page that i'm working on is to show classified ads with an image for each ad, is that not going to work with this code?

yelvington

PHP doesn't repeal the laws of HTML. You can't embed binary data in HTML. You have to refer to it by pointing to a unique URL.

In other words: images and text go in separate URLs.

The bottom line is that you CAN put images in a database and use PHP to regenerate them ... but why? A database is not necessarily a good place to put large binary objects.

The typical large-scale content-management/production system will store media files in the filesystem, and store metadata in the database. The DB is used to locate the proper object, but not to store and serve it. The latter is simple work, and the filesystem is faster/lighter/cheaper for simple tasks.

Our company (Morris Digital Works) makes such systems. Our classified systems power all of the Morris newspapers, and we've recently licensed our technology to Media General and A.H. Belo. We have a very sophisticated data model implemented on Oracle, and we have invested many, many man-years in a powerful proprietary templating language called MTL.

But we store images in the filesystem.

bliss322

thanks for your help! i swear, this forum has helped me on my way to understanding php so much better.

anyway, i would also prefer to store photos in the filesystem, even an asp developer like myself knows that; but i'm curious, how do you manage irregularities such as identical filenames?

okay, thanks again!

yelvington

When you "check in" the photo, get the unique id from the database and store it under that name.