Display images from SQL Database - the easy way

• Download VSCustomRendererLibrary - 103.84 KB

Introduction

This is version 3.0 of the VsCustomRenderer control. You can find previous versions here: 2.0 and 1.0.

Background

This project was inspired by an article on code-project written by dev2dev: Article
Parts of the code were taken from that project.

Using the code

To test this control:

• Open or create a website.
• Add the VSCustomRendererLibrary reference to the website.
• Add the following line in <httpHandlers> section in webconfig:

<add verb="*" path="*.jpg" type="VSCustomRendererLibrary.VsImageHandler, 
VSCustomRendererLibrary"/>

If you cannot find this section in your webconfig file, just create it under <system.web>:

<system.web>
    ......
     <httpHandlers>
          <add verb="*" path="*.jpg" type="VSCustomRendererLibrary.VsImageHandler, 
VSCustomRendererLibrary"/>
     </httpHandlers>
</system.web>

• Open/create a new aspx page.
• Add a SqlDataSource connected to an sql table or view (this project was tested with the SQL Server 2005 EE).
• Add a gridview and connect it to the SqlDataSource.
• In the gridview add the image column and transform it into a template field.
• Select Edit Template from the gridview toolbar menu.
• Add a VSCustomRenderer into the ItemTemplate. Bind the control to the datasource field.

Points of Interest

This webcontrol now works with Ajax.
This controls no longer saves images to disk in order to display them. The pictures are displayed directly from memory through a IHttpHandler.
This http handler does not open a new database connection, it just displays the images from memory so there are no delays in page rendering and no extra parameters to set.

History

All the versions of this control are also posted on codeplex.