Managing account size

[j4mes]

Hi there, i'm looking for some advice on best practise for managing the size of a users account.

Its for a gallery system, currently then the images are uploaded to the server, the image size and its thumbnail size are retrieced and recorded into the database tables 'image' and 'thumbnail'.

I want to set each user a standard account size limit. Before I allow upload to go ahead, I will check to see if their account has enough room to store the incoming image.

What i'd like some advice on is how i manage the uploaded foldersize. Should I simply query the database ('image' and 'thumbnail') each and every time an image is uploaded, to return a sum of the images for that user? I can then use that value to check against the limit size.

Or should I keep a constant record of the account size? Maybe add a new row to the album table (db_albumsize), then when an image is uploaded it retrieves the current image total and adds on the new imagesize and stores the new total?

I hope that makes sense,

TIA

JAmes

[midget]

Could be a good idea to store current 'used space' brought from DB on a session variable right at user login process... then update that session var each time the user pretends to upload a file checkng the available space for that account.

The matter... maybe you will need to let transfer the whole file to evaluate the real size and make calaculations... and maybe at the end you will need to say NOT ALLOWED to the user 🙁

Hope this help.

Good luck.
midget

[mtimdog]

when you upload the file you can use a hidden field called MAX_FILE_SIZE (although like the man says, it's not always supported by the browser.)
<excerpt from the man>

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="URL" method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="30000" />
Send this file: <input name="userfile" type="file" />
<input type="submit" value="Send File" />
</form>

The "URL" in the above example should be replaced, and point to a PHP file. The MAX_FILE_SIZE hidden field (measured in bytes) must precede the file input field, and its value is the maximum filesize accepted. Also, be sure your file upload form has enctype="multipart/form-data" otherwise the file upload will not work.

Warning
The MAX_FILE_SIZE is advisory to the browser, although PHP also checks it. Changing this on the browser size is quite easy, so you can never rely on files with a greater size being blocked by this feature. The PHP-settings for maximum-size, however, cannot be fooled. You should add the MAX_FILE_SIZE form variable anyway as it saves users the trouble of waiting for a big file being transferred only to find that it was too big and the transfer actually failed.

</excerpt>

In addition, you can set php's upload_max_filesize (ini_set?) in a .htaccess file so php limits large files--->if every album has a different directory then create a script to create/manipulate a .htaccess file on login, but i'm not sure if apache/php will check it before upload. If it doesn't, then that would be a waste of code as you could easily check the size of the uploaded file.