File Uploading and Manipulation

[David_Wood]

I have searched many times for the answer to this problem but have never managed to actually find the complete answer.

What I want to be able to do is:

1. Allow a user to upload a file to the server.
2. Write the file name to a mysql database together with other information from the upload form.
3. Allow users to then download the file.

I have managed to:
a. Create a form that will write input fields to the database.
b. Create a form that will upload a file.

Where I have the porolem is in tying these two together and writing the information to the database.

I thing that once I have managed this part the downloading should be fairly straightforward.

Any help and/or advice would be very much appreciated.

[siwis]

Once upoaded, php places any files into its temp location.
The field name on your <input type="file" name="field_name" size="50"> will be available to the next portion of the script as an array $_POST['field_name']

This array carries a number of pieces of information within it pertaining to your file, like the file name, its size in bytes, its type etc. If you want to know what thase array chunks are, simply echo them to screen $POST['field_name']['0'], $POST['field_name']['1'] etc. If you're running with register_globals = on, its even easier because php automatically generates variables for each of the array chunks:
$field_name_name is the name of the uploaded file
$field_name_size is its size in bytes
$field_name_type is its file type etc

Once you have these chunks of information, you can start to use them to handle the uploaded file, for example using the filename chunk to insert into the database. BUT before you use the file directly in your site you need to get it from the temp location into your site structure. This is achieved with the copy() function

copy($field_name, $ROOT_SERVER_PATH_TO_YOUR_DESIRED_LOCATION.$new_file_name);

$new_file_name can be exactly the same as that which was uploaded