Forum OpenACS Development: how to import image via url?

OpenACS specific
ad_httpget https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=ad%5fhttpget
util_httpget https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=util%5fhttpget

Not sure why there are two openacs specific procs.

It looks like the new aolserver 4 procs I listed there are sufficient and the OpenACS ones should be deprecated or at least improved to use the AOLserver 4 apis.

Torben,

Part of the problems is that there are so many ways to do it that are good, a lot of people roll their own to get exactly what they want. For instance, I have been looking at the new ns_http which is only available in AOLserver 4.5 (maybe ported to naviserver, but not in earlier AOLservers). This is good for handing off work to another thread. You can queue the request and an smart client thread could go about handling the details of download, retry, etc. You can't really do that in a connection thread. Or, you could queue the request, close the connection with [ns_conn close] then do a [ns_http wait] on the queued request. One advantage is that [ns_http queue] will complain if the request url doesn't look valid. Essentially, you simplify the logic of building a smart client. Nobody's really done it yet.

The four Tcl level AOLserver commands are ns_httpget, ns_httppost, ns_httpsget or ns_httpspost

Since these commands use ns_sock commands, the result should be 'binary', or exactly as received with no encoding conversions of other modifications. You should be able to open a file, fconfigure -binary and write the result.

It's not working for me..

Heres the code in the tcl page:

ad_page_contract {
    @ test
} {
    { url "http://kappacorp.com/fwgoofiness.jpg" }
}

if {[catch {set get_id [ns_http queue GET $url]} err ]} {
    set page $err
} else {
    set status [ns_http wait $get_id page]

    if { $status eq 1 } {
        ns_log Notice "get-image.tcl status $status , page $page"
    } else {
        # no page info returned, just record warning                                                                                                                                       
        ns_log Notice "ref 101: Error: status: $status , url: $url , page: $page"
    }
}
ns_return 200 image/jpeg $page

Whatever the image, it seems that 9 bytes are returned that get interpreted as 4 or 5 nonstandard characters.. depending on the interface. What am I doing wrong?

here is a short version based on the relatively new xotcl-core class ::xo::HttpRequest (cvs head)

ad_page_contract {
    @ test
} {
    { url "http://kappacorp.com/fwgoofiness.jpg" }
}

set r [::xo::HttpRequest new -url $url]
ns_headers connid [$r set status_code] [$r set content_type] [$r set content_length]
ns_write [$r set data]

Note that this version does not require you to write into the file system. Most probably, you can do similar with ns_http*.

I am guessing you are not going to want to download the file every time.