uploading pictures and retrieving them

In case anybody is interested, here is the steps needed to upload a picture to a server, save it in a mysql database, and then have it recalled for displaying on html based web pages:

Here is what you will need:

A) Perl 5
B) CGI.pm - thanks to Lincoln Stein
C) HTML
D) MYSQL or some other database
E) perhaps Unix admin priveleges

This is broken into 2 parts - submitting a picture, displaying a picture.

PART 1
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1. Add the input statement to your html page: (this will use the type=file to prompt a file input dialog box) ...

<INPUT name=piccie type=file class=inputimage style="HEIGHT:
22px; WIDTH: 192px">


2. From the same web page , we will call the script (ie savepicture.pl) to save the paramater named piccie (see above).

we need to add the all important enctype to the <form> tag (or no pictures, people !) ...

<form name="itemsadd" action="/cgi-bin/bb/savepicture.pl" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

3. Open up the 'savepicture.pl' script ... you should do a few things here: We need to take the pointer from the file parameter sent us via input and take that pointer and start saving that data from your computer to your server - aka uploading. In this case the input parameter is called "piccie". So lets save the file, give it a name and location on your server. You will need to change the directory write priveleges for users called 'nobody' , so you need to chmod the directory ...
chmod 777 storedpicturedirectory.
(note the priveleges will have to be the admin's call- as 777 is way to much , but for simplicity and debuggin sake, lets carry on...)

4. LETS write the file to the server:
In the savepicture.pl script, be sure to include these directives...

$dirout= "/home/httpd/html/mydir/images"; #this is where we will actually write the file
$htmldirout = "/mydir/images"; # this is where we tell the database to find the image for retrieval
$filename = $q->param('piccie'); # lets get the file from our html page (where we called this script from )
# write the file out to the server
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
open (OUTFILE, ">$dirout/$filename");
while ($bytesread=read($filename,$buffer,1024))
{
print OUTFILE $buffer;
}
close $filename;
my $finalfile = $htmldirout . "/" . $fileout;

5. SAVE THE $finalfile field to your mysql database (or other database) - save this info to varchar type field. For purposes of use, $finalfile will be a different name than dirout (server dir), as when retrieving the file, you will be retrieving from a /home/httpd/html/mydir/images directory. Thus you might want to call the file /mydir/mypicture. Right !

OK Your done the input side, you have uploaded the file, saved it to the server (preferably in the wwwdocs dir - (ie /home/httpd/html/ ) and and also written the path + filename to a varchar field in your database .



PART II - Displaying it back to the web page.
You want to create a perl script to output your record ,ie using CGI.pm , etc...

1 Retrieve the picture url from your database ...
In this example I have retrieved the name of the image from a mysql recordset , -- ie. returned a record set into any array ; thus the image file name is contained in $retarray->[0][7] array.

here is a sample return from a mysql dbi call, containing my picture link or url ...

$retarray = rset->ReturnManyRows("select category, item, description, price, reserve, durationof,piccie from auctionitem where aa = " . "'" . $iid . "%'");

2) In your show picture script, print the IMG :
Here is some sample syntax containing the image link or url to your server's image directory...

This will display the image on the html page...


print "<IMG NAME=". '"' . "bbb" . '"' . " SRC=" . '"' . $retarray->[0][7] . '"' . ">";



THATS IT, hope it works !
byron