Need help selecting a good upload plugin.

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm designing a website that allows users to upload documents, images, mp3s and videos. What is a good upload plugin that can handle all these file types?

Required: * Simple integration with rmagick or other image processing plugins

Nice to have: * Progress bar * Multiple file uploads

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Brandon

2

Try SWFUpload and PaperClip.

3

Or SWFUpload and attachment_fu. SWFUpload does have some caveats you need to overcome and I should start a blog and write a post on it. Basically it comes down to overcoming Rails 2’s security measures without disabling them and it’s perfectly possible. There are some posts around that deal with it, but they all have their flaws. I’ll just post some relevant sections of my code in here so everyone at least has a reference to go by (it should be indexed by google).

  1. Make a file “swf_session.rb” in config/initializers/ with http://pastie.org/244830 as the contents (this is a slightly modified version of the original author code)

  2. Include the following in your layout (and put the appropriate files in the javascript/swfupload/ folder of course (swfupload_cookies will automatically add all of your app’s cookies as POST parameters):

    javascript_include_tag(“swfupload/swfupload”,

                                            "swfupload/swfupload_swfobject",

                                        "swfupload/swfupload_cookies",

                                        :cache => "swfupload")

  3. Add this in the section of your layout:

  4. Optionally you can add this to your application.js file (to automatically add the authenticity token to all your custom javascript): http://pastie.org/244842

  5. I use a custom javascript “class” to handle all of the uploads, this is part of that code (you’ll need to implement all the handlers and adapt the code to your application of course): http://pastie.org/244838

file_post_name : "document[uploaded_data]" is the name of the model instance and field you want to post to (@document.uploaded_data), attachment_fu automatically handles this field.
  1. Expose the relevant controller actions (the ones that handle the uploads) so the session can be passed in as a POST variable:

class DocumentsController < ApplicationController

session :cookie_only => false, :only => :create

def create

 ... <create new document code here>

end

end

  1. Add the mime-types gem to config/environment.rb as a requirement:

config.gem “mime-types”, :lib => “mime/types”, :version => ‘>= 1’

  1. Patch the attachment_fu plugin a little: vendor/plugins/attachment_fu/lib/technoweenie/attachment.fu.rb: http://pastie.org/244854

This is just to make your life easier and let attachment_fu do its magic without you having to worry about setting the content_type.

Implementing SWFUpload can be quite an adventure and you really need to understand what’s going on, but the result is the best “ajax” upload you can imagine.