disk based file management

ctnz

Hi all,

I am currently not an Aware IM user, but stumbled upon your website on one of the mac news sites.

I am interested in how Aware IM could handle in different ways the submission of files (generically any image, document e.g. pdf, word, excel etc.).

Secondly, it is also important for me to find out how I could manipulate those files further by modifying the content directly inside the actual file, rename, add metadata, move to another folder on the server before moving the file altogether to another volume on the network for further use by internal network users NOT logged in/or using the Aware IM interface at all.

The reason I am asking is, if I wanted to develop an app that allows full control of manipulating file content by both external customers and internal staff through Aware IM and then at a given point in time, internal users will have to take those files and work with them in proprietary apps like InDesign, Photoshop or others. For example, a customer uploads an excel file to the server, it gets approved as final by customer and locked for editing by that customer, Aware IM copies the file to another Volume on a file server, internal user then uses that file to link (or otherwise import content) to an InDesign document.

Hope this makes sense, and I guess the critical question is, does Aware IM store the file in an actual BLOB field in the DB, or is it possible to specify disk based storage outside of the DB?

Look forward to your answers!

Chris

aware_support

Chris,

there are two ways Aware IM can store files:
1) As a BLOB field in the database
2) As a full path to the file in the file system on disk

If a file is stored in a BLOB users will be able to upload the file to the server to be stored in the database and download it from the server when they need to view/edit the file already stored in the database.

If the file is of a standard type recognized by the browser (DOC, XLS, PDF etc) the browser will download the file from the server and open the corresponding viewer automatically (Word, Excel, Acrobat Reader etc). If the file type is not recognized the file will be downloaded in the binary format from the database to the client's machine.

This is a recommended way of working with files - I mean, if the file is stored in the database, then it is stored in the database. You can't be talking about renaming the file, moving it to a different folder etc. It is kept in the database securely and whenever the file is required for editing the copy of the file can be downloaded from the database and then uploaded back if required. Aware IM provides all the required interface for that.

The alternative way is, of course, to store the path to the file in the file system for reference purposes. Then you are free to move and rename the file in the file system, but then if you want to keep your Aware IM records in sync, you need to update the path in the Aware IM database.

Hope this makes sense.