Marc Dormey

Posts Tagged ‘image handler’

A good way to handle your resources in ASP.NET MVC is by storing them in a database. With Microsoft SQL Server 2008 supporting streaming (read more), keeping your resources in the database gives you all of Microsoft SQL Server’s features for free. (ie. querying, profiling, backup, synchronisation and not to mention speed)

In the past we would normally create a HTTP handler to write to the Response.OutputStream, but with ASP.NET MVC we simply need to create another action on our preferred controller…

First we create an ‘ImageResult’ class which will handle our output.

public class ImageResult : ActionResult
{
    public Image Image { get; set; }
    public string ContentType { get; set; }
    public ImageFormat ImageFormat { get; set; }

    public ImageResult(Image image, string contentType, ImageFormat imageFormat)
    {
        Image = image;
        ContentType = contentType;
        ImageFormat = imageFormat;
    }

    public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
    {
        context.HttpContext.Response.Clear();
        context.HttpContext.Response.ContentType = ContentType;
        Image.Save(context.HttpContext.Response.OutputStream, ImageFormat);
    }
}

And then we simply create an action for our specific needs:

public ActionResult ResourceImage(string key)
{
    var resourceItem = _provider.GetResourceItem(key);
    var bitMap = new Bitmap(resourceItem.Stream);

    return new ImageResult(bitMap, resourceItem.ContentType, resourceItem.Format);
}

public ActionResult ResourceFile(string key)
{
    var resourceItem = _provider.GetResourceItem(key);
    return File(resourceItem.Stream, resourceItem.Format, key);
}

All you need to do is create your own provider that would find the key in the database and return the stream and the format of the file.