ASP.NET BLOB & Thumbnail Controls 2.2.0.1

Raise your hands if you enjoy the power of "Zero Code" ? That's everyone. You are an ASP.NET Developer and you are very much fond of binary data, you realized that, keeping your images and other files in the SQL Server (or any database) BLOB type field is very much organizing. Yes, that's right. But when you needed to render your binary data directly from the SQL Server (or any database) BLOB type field to your ASP.NET page, you got headache. You needed to write many lines of codes to create an ASHX handler file and then, call that handler from your image control's source property. Its fine when you got only one instance of the image to display. What about if you need to show many images something like using DataGridView. Also when you need to provide your user a hyperlink so that when the hyperlink is clicked, the file download prompt should appear and the file content should be the content from your database's BLOB field, you got headache. You thought, why there is no Control same like Image Control with a property of type byte[] so that you could directly bind that BLOB field of your database to the byte[] property of that control !!!

The answer is YES, There is a control for your purposes. SpiceLogic BLOB & Thumbnail Control. This control not only fulfills your image rendering desire, but also it gives you many more features and options. You can show the image as thumbnails; you can directly upload files to the byte[] property where a file uploader is just built in. You can also instruct this control to upload the image and re-size it upon uploading. Guess what! You can display hyperlink to prompt File Download where the file content directly comes from the byte[] property (or BLOB field of the database). Like any other standard image button control, this control supports post-back events like Click, Command, FileUploading, FileUploaded etc.

It is a set of ASP.NET server controls for developing SQL BLOB & Thumbnail related web applications in the most efficient, organized and object oriented manner without requiring you writing any codes or ashx http handler files.

Feature Highlights

Displaying BLOB Images + Displaying Thumbnails

Powerful Zero Code Data Binding Feature:

Development is significantly simplified by using its enhanced design time User Interface, which lets you do all major tasks in a completely code less manner. You can simply bind the byte[] BlobData property of this control to your VarBinary or any byte[] datatype of your DataSource and place this control in your DataBound Container Control like GridView or DetailsView. Your DataSource varbinary field Image will be displayed in your browser as you wish.

You can also Update/Insert new Blob records using this control (Setting Upload Mode=true) without writing any code. You will feel as if you are using data bound Picture Box control in Windows Form Application where Picture Box’s Image property is directly bound to a byte[] type field of your data source. View Screen Shot of a DataBound GridView Control where Image is shown as thumbnail from SQL BLOB. You may configure it so that clicking the thumbnail will show a pop up window with full sized image, but again, you wont need to write code for this.

If you are selling e-book or software products that you want your user to download in a secured page after payment, you can set the File Name programmatically any value you want and render the link at that secure page. So, when your user download the file, you can disable the link for the future and thus your user wont be able to download from the same link again and he or she wont have any idea from where the file was downloaded and thus he or she cant even share the link. Say for example, if you have a page where user enters after providing his login information, you may use the following snippet to program a download link:

This control never creates any temporary file in your server so you wont need to worry about setting any WRITE permission to your web folders. There are some solutions available in the market which allows you to encrypt downloadlink or generate dynamic download link for software sales or eBook sales which really requires you to make a temporary folder in your server with Write permission etc... But our control won’t bother you to do any of these.

ASP NET BLOB Thumbnail Controls will work in your shared hosting if your hosting is configured to FULL TRUST. If you want to use this control in MEDIUM TRUST settings, please do let us know. We will give you a customized dll with a dependency file so that it will work in your shared hosting with MEDIUM TRUST configuration.