Rails: upload a file OR store a url

Question

I\'m developing a form where I want to allow users to either upload a file, or enter a url to an existing file.

The idea is to allow users to attach various \'multimedia

Answer 1

Don't save the url unless you really have too. The thing is that when you save a url, you can't process it to create a thumbnail or multiple styles of the image. Also, when you display the images in a page you will have to make external calls and that can slow down the page or even worse, if the link breaks sometime in the future your users will see an empty image.

Which is also the case with youtube videos. However, with videos you typically want to store and display more information than just the video. You can have two tables - one for videos and one for images. In the video table you have title, desc, author, duration, embed code, thumbnail (image attachment).

You can download any image when a URL is given and save it like a normal file. Using carrierwave -

@object.remote_image_url = "http://www.foo.com/file.png"
@object.save

In the view, you would have both options, perhaps side by side and you can let them post to different actions. So if a file is selected and posted you save it normally. If a url is entered, then you can check if it's a video site or not - if video, parse out the info using the video_info gem and store it. Otherwise just use the two lines above and save the url image.

Note

My answer doesn't discuss the quality / nature of user inputs. The likely-hood of someone entering an incorrect url is high in my opinion, so you want to wrap attempts to save the url as an image in a begin-rescue block and perhaps using JS limit the video domains to just a few websites which you will be able to parse.

Answer 2

What I will probably do is to have a drop down in the file upload form to select if the file is from the disk or from external url.

By default it will set to "from disk", and if they select external url, you could use some AJAX magic and hide the file upload text box and have a text box to use the external url/script etc..

in the table, you can keep another two columns,

1 - external url

2 - file category (external / uploaded file)

by that way you can distinguish the files and how they what to display in the view

HTH