Attaching Images to an article.

[cainscripter]

Hi there.

I have created a database table named "image" which is storing blob images and what I want to do is when I create an article in another table, for example "news", I want to be able to access and attach an image from the "image" table so it appears in the article.

The problem is I don't know where to start! Is it possible to create a row in a table that accesses the path to another table in the database?

Any help would be great.

[Roger_Ramjet]

Storing the image file in a database table is a waste of time because the image has to be extracted and recreated as a file so that it can be linked to via an HTML <img> tag and served up.

What you should do is to store the image file as a file and just store the name and path in the db. Then you can generate the html to use that file.

[Sxooter]

Roger Ramjet wrote:

Storing the image file in a database table is a waste of time because the image has to be extracted and recreated as a file so that it can be linked to via an HTML <img> tag and served up.

Not entirely true. You can retrieve and display an image without the intermediate step of creating a file. Something like:

<?php
header("content-type: image/jpeg");
// do stuff to open db and get image data into a variable or whatnot here
print $picturedata;
?>

What you should do is to store the image file as a file and just store the name and path in the db. Then you can generate the html to use that file.

I totally agree. The only time to store the image in the database is when you have multiple front-end servers and you need transactional integrity of the image changes along with db data. It's rare, but it happens.