I have been trying to read the documentation for GridFS and MongoDB for awhile. They just keep repeating the same thing and I can't make sense of it.
Desired Output: The user submits a form that form contains many fields, but one is an image. The request needs to store the data in a collection and make a new document, which can be retrieved later. My main question is how do I use GridFS in this situation to store an image in that document.
It says GridFS makes two collections in my database files and chunks. So how do those collections relate to my other collection which has the other form data?
I assume a reference to these files and chucks collection, however, I can't make any sense of this. It's been a few days and I feel like it's time to reach out to my StackOverflow community.
Can someone please explain to me the program flow and key points for how I can achieve my goal of storing an image in a document using gridfs?
GridFS is mentioned everywhere and seems to be popular but I can't make sense of it. These moments of utter confusion usually result in a breakthrough, so I'm eager to learn from veterans and experts.
GridFS collections are internal implementation detail of GridFS. There is no linking between them and your other data.
To write to and read from GridFS, you would use GridFS APIs provided by your driver. Generally this means that, if you are saving for example some fields and a binary blob like an image, you would perform the save in two steps (one insert/update operation for the fields and a separate GridFS operation for the binary blob).
You wouldn't store the image in your document. You would store the image in GridFS, and in your document you could include a reference to the GridFS file (those have their own ids).