Composite C1 blog - not using media folder - c1-cms

Question

I have a Composite C1 4.04 site.
The user needs a blog - and they can upload images.
However, the images go into some weird virtual 'media' folder that apparently doesn't exist - and they aren't stored like normal images.
I would like them instead to just go into a regular folder - as I need to manipulate them later - to re-compress them (for example).
How can I do this?
thx

Answer 1

The media files are plugable in Composite C1, in the default implementation media files are represented as
A record in a database, that contains file's meta data (mime type, etc)
A physical file with the content, located under "\App_Data\Media" f.e.
\App_Data\Media\0b11c288-5432-4482-a776-3eb0ac9ad437
This has certain advantages - having a database record allows to keep additional meta data relevant to serving http requests (such as MimeType), apply security to those files, etc.
; also file names don't follow file system restrictions (such as path length and certain reserved names/forbidden characters) - so when you upload a file,
you don't have to care if website folder path + media folder path + file name would exceed 255 characters.
There are also other media archive plug-ings, when f.e. files are kept in a SQL data base or files are fetched from a Facebook album.
If you want to compress the image files, you can iterate over files in \App_Data\Media\ folder. You can get the list of media files by calling Get() on a DataConnection instance.
If you want to export media to a different solution, you can use the following code that copies a Composite C1 media folder to a physical folder:
private int MediaToFiles(string mediaFolder, string physicalFolder)
{
if (!mediaFolder.StartsWith("/"))
{
mediaFolder = "/" + mediaFolder;
}
string mediaFolderPrefix = mediaFolder == "/" ? "/" : mediaFolder + "/";
using (var conn = new DataConnection())
{
var mediaFiles = conn.Get<IMediaFile>().Where(f => string.Equals(f.FolderPath, mediaFolder, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
|| f.FolderPath.StartsWith(mediaFolderPrefix, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
.ToList();
if(mediaFiles.Count == 0) return 0;
Directory.CreateDirectory(physicalFolder);
int newFiles = 0;
foreach (var file in mediaFiles)
{
string targetFolder = file.FolderPath.Length <= mediaFolderPrefix.Length ?
physicalFolder : Path.Combine(physicalFolder, file.FolderPath.Substring(mediaFolderPrefix.Length));
Directory.CreateDirectory(targetFolder);
string targetFilePath = Path.Combine(targetFolder, file.FileName);
if(File.Exists(targetFilePath) && File.GetLastWriteTime(targetFilePath) == file.LastWriteTime) continue;
using (var stream = file.GetReadStream())
{
using (var outputStream = File.Create(targetFilePath, 8192))
{
stream.CopyTo(outputStream);
outputStream.Close();
}
}
File.SetLastWriteTime(targetFilePath, file.LastWriteTime.Value);
newFiles++;
}
return newFiles;
}
}
// Example of usage:
int newFiles = MediaToFiles("/", #"c:\Temp\C1media"); // Copying all the media files
OutPut("New files: " + newFiles);
int newFiles2 = MediaToFiles("/Office", #"c:\Temp\C1media\Office pictures"); // Copying only "Office" media folder
OutPut("New files: " + newFiles2);