ASP.NET MVC: loading images from database and displaying their in view

Question

We have some images in our database and want to display their in view. I find two way to do this - the first: we create action method in co

Answer 1

There won't be much difference in performance between the two methods. Obviously using an http handler will be the fastest you could get because the request doesn't go through the MVC lifecycle (routing, instantiating a controller, model binding, invoking the action) but I think this is a micro optimization and I would personally use the first approach as it is more adapted in an MVC scenario. If you later realize that this is a bottleneck for your application by performing extensive load tests you could always switch to the http handler approach.

As far as your second question is concerned about the helper, the answer is no, you cannot do this easily. The only possibility is to use the data URI scheme but this is not supported by all browsers. This way if your model has the byte array of the image you could write a helper which renders the following:

<img src="data:image/png;base64, iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAA..." alt="Red dot" />

The image data is base64 encoded directly into the page. Another drawback is that those images will never be cached and your HTML pages could become very large.