Motion Standing Still

Eek, a week’s gone by without a blog entry.  The joys of paid work I guess.  Anyways, I have some further comments about the nginx upload module that I previously blogged about.

I can report back that it’s working a treat, once I figured myself around it’s undocumented behaviour.  I’m running it on two sites with Nginx 0.7.10 and 0.7.9.  Additionally the ‘dummy’ location doesn’t need to be defined at all, even though the upload location references it.  I thought it was, but apparently not.

Something that astute readers will note is that what I’ve talked about doing won’t work unless everywhere the app is used, including developer machines, is through nginx with the upload module.  Basically you can’t talk directly to the application instance while your developing because the action receiving the upload won’t be expecting the file in the request:

def upload_completed
 
  if params['upload_data.name'] && params['upload_data.path']
    # do something with the file
  end
 
  redirect_to :action => 'upload'
end

You can get around this by setting up a before_filter which detects if that’s the case and and simulates what the upload module does:

require 'tempfile'
 
before_filter :extract_upload, :only => [:upload_complete]
 
private
 
  def extract_upload
 
    if !params['upload_data.path'] && params[:upload_data]
      tmp_file = Tempfile.new(params[:upload_data].original_filename)
      File.open(tmpfile.path, "w" ) { |f| f.write(params[:upload_data].read) }
      params['upload_data.path'] = tmpfile.path
      params['upload_data.name'] = params[:upload_data].original_filename
    end
 
  end

Easy as.  What if you’re using something like attachment_fu where you would normally pass the file data from the params hash through to the model as it’s created?  If you follow this article about LocalFile then it’ll still work a treat for you:

def upload_completed
  if params['upload_data.name'] && params['upload_data.path']
 
    # pass to attachment_fu using thirdparty LocalFile class:
    # http://benr75.com/articles/2008/01/04/attachment_fu-now-with-local-file-fu
    current_user.uploads.create({:uploaded_data => LocalFile.new(params['uploaded_data.path'])})
 
  end
 
  redirect_to :action => 'upload'
end

Not sure if it works with Paperclip though, but I will be testing this at some point, so I’ll report back what I find.

There you have it, that should work nicely for you now.  If it doesn’t drop me a note and I’ll see if I can help.