Processing file updloads on the server.

Streams in NodeJS are incredibly powerful. I found out myself for a site I’m working on where users are allowed to upload images from their mobile devices. Images are typically sent from a camera photo but they can also be selected from a local gallery or clould storage. Desktop users can use the ‘file-open’ dialog.

The code below is a request handler written in coffee-script that handles a mult-part http POST (containing a file) from an Express route. Steams are modern, async and event-driven. Instead of writing temp files to the file-system, we stream the file into a mongoDB GridStore. Streams are great for uploads, not only because a file doesn’t touch a disk file-system but they are processed in a non-blocking, asyncronous fashion. A stream doesn’t have to process a large file in one buffer either which allows the server to use memory more efficiently. With busboy the file’s stream pipes it’s way straight into mongoDB via gridfs-steam).

My original goal was to upload a file into a mongoDB GridStore and I was gonna stop right there and call it a day, problem solved. I’d achieved my goal, in fact I’d gone one better and used streams. Good night, Bob’s your Uncle! We can quit now. But noooo, I’d been reading Async JavaScript and was very impressed by the async.parallel example but I didn’t have a good use case. Plus, I also have a kid in college and I was trying to impress him with my open-source chops. As we began early testing of our app it quickly became apparent the need to support multiple platforms with multiple versions of each image. We needed image versions more sized for Desktop, Tablet, Mobile and really small for Thumb images. You know that commercial where you buy 1 suit at the regular price and you get 3 suits free? Well sharp image processing with Async.Parallel is kinda like that. Upload one file and store 4 more for free…

Coffee Script

For extra-bonus points: What does the 201/created JSON response look like?