Greetings!
on my site, I have a form for clients to send detailed instructions for projects that I am working on. This information is stored in a mysql db so I can go in and look at the current project information.

What I'm attempting to do is allow users to upload files that need worked on... this file could be anything from an image that needs altered to a spreadsheet. I need to be able to accommodate every file type.

I'm able to store these files in as a BLOB, but am having a heck of a time retrieving and downloading them. I've found very little helpful information about file handling with mysql.

Any help on this would be great! a shove in the right direction!

Also, I was wondering if perhaps simply uploading the files and saving them to the server would be a viable approach? certainly would be simpler. If I did that, would there be security issues involved with people uploading potentially malicious files?

Thanks!

In my opinion, storing binary data in a db is usually hard to work with and sometimes cause corrupted data. I would upload the file in a ftp location or above public root location or inside public root with htaccess blocking access. You can save the path location to the db and use ftp or readfile() to serve as a download link.

Thanks for that. a follow-up question:

If I have the files uploaded to a higher location, is there an elegant method of viewing and displaying the contents of that upload directory while linking the file names to the client / project it is related to?

or better yet, when I list the active projects, each project would have a link to the appropriate file?

Thanks!

By using the native dir() class you can read the directory contents and provide links