Insert image into MySQL database

Question

I've been trying for days to do this and got absolutely nowhere. I know it can be done, but I've been trawling SO for answers and got nothing working.

1. Upload a picture using my REST client
2. Insert that uploaded picture into the MySQL database.

What I have tried: Following Load_File doesn't work, I'm using OS X so I don't know how to change ownership of folders etc... how do I do this? I never got an answer in my last post about this. How do I do this?

I've also tried doing it another way: http://examples.javacodegeeks.com/enterprise-java/rest/jersey/jersey-file-upload-example/

This does not work at all. I keep getting the error described in this post: Jersey REST WS Error: "Missing dependency for method... at parameter at index X", but the answer doesn't help me as I still don't know what it should be...

Can anyone please guide me through it?

I'm using a Jersey REST client in Java. Many of the tutorials to do this mention a pom.xml file, I don't have one or know what it is.

Thank you, Omar

EDIT: This is the file upload:

package com.omar.rest.apimethods;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import javax.ws.rs.Consumes;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Response;
import com.sun.jersey.core.header.FormDataContentDisposition;
import com.sun.jersey.multipart.FormDataParam;


@Path("/files")
public class FileUpload {

private String uploadLocationFolder = "/Users/Omar/Pictures/";

@POST
@Path("/upload")
@Consumes(MediaType.MULTIPART_FORM_DATA)
public Response uploadFile(
        @FormDataParam("file") InputStream fileInputStream,
        @FormDataParam("file") FormDataContentDisposition contentDispositionHeader) {

    String filePath = "/Users/Omar/Pictures/"   + contentDispositionHeader.getFileName();

    // save the file to the server
    saveFile(fileInputStream, filePath);

    String output = "File saved to server location : " + filePath;

    return Response.status(200).entity(output).build();

}

// save uploaded file to a defined location on the server
private void saveFile(InputStream uploadedInputStream,
        String serverLocation) {

    try {
        OutputStream outpuStream = new FileOutputStream(new File(serverLocation));
        int read = 0;
        byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];

        outpuStream = new FileOutputStream(new File(serverLocation));
        while ((read = uploadedInputStream.read(bytes)) != -1) {
            outpuStream.write(bytes, 0, read);
        }
        outpuStream.flush();
        outpuStream.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {

        e.printStackTrace();
    }

}

}

Schema for the table (one I created for testing): image_id: int auto-incrementing PK, picture: BLOB. I could make it a file link and just load the image on my website but I can't even get that far yet.

Answer 1

I would recommend storing your image in some kind of cheap, well permissioned flat storage like network storage, and then storing a path to that storage location in the database. If you're storing your image as a blob, the database is going to do something similar to this already anyways, but I believe there will be some overhead involved with making the database manage storing and retrieving these images. These images will eat through a lot of your database's disk space, and if you want to add more space for images, adding space to flat storage should be easier than adding space to a database.