I am using the Microsoft Azure .NET client libraries to interact with Azure cloud storage. I need to be able to access additional information about each blob in its metadata collection. I am currently using CloudBlobDirectory.ListBlobs() method to get a list of blobs in a particular directory of a directory structure I've devised in the blob names. The ListBlobs() method returns a list of IListBlobItem objects. They only have a couple of properties: Url and references to parent directory and parent container. I need to get to the metadata of the actual blob objects.
I envisioned there would be a way to either cast the IListBlobItem to a BlockBlob object or use the IListBlockItem to get a reference to the BlockBlob, but can't seem to find a way to do that.
My question is: Is there a way to get a BlockBlob object from this method, or do I have to use a different way of getting the actual BlockBlob objects? If different, then can you suggest a way to achieve this, while also being able to filter by the "directory" scheme?
OK... I found a way to do this, and while it seems a little clunky and indirect, it does achieve the main thing I thought should be doable, which is to cast the IListBlobItem directly to a CloudBlockBlob object.
What I am doing is getting the list from the Directory object's ListBlobs() method and then looping over each item in the list and casting the item to a CloudBlockBlob object and then calling the FetchAttributes() method to retrieve the properties (including the metadata). Then add a new "info" object to a new list of info objects. Here's the code I'm using:
CloudBlobDirectory dir = container.GetDirectoryReference(dirPath);
var blobs = dir.ListBlobs(true);
foreach (IListBlobItem item in blobs)
{
CloudBlockBlob blob = (CloudBlockBlob)item;
blob.FetchAttributes();
files.Add(new ImageInfo
{
FileUrl = item.Uri.ToString(),
FileName = item.Uri.PathAndQuery.Replace(restaurantId.ToString().PadLeft(3, '0') + "/", ""),
ImageName = blob.Metadata["Name"]
});
}
The whole "Blob" concept seems needlessly complex and doesn't seem to achieve what I'd have thought would have been one of the main features of the Blob wrapper. That is, a way to expand search capabilities by allowing a query over name, directory, container and metadata. I'd have thought you could construct a linq query that would read somewhat like: "return a list of all blobs in the 'images' container, that are in the 'natural/landscapes/' directory path that have a metadata key of 'category' with the value of 'sunset'". There doesn't seem to be a way to do that and that seems to be a missed opportunity to me. Oh, well.
If I'm wrong and way off base here, please let me know.
This approach has been developed for Java, but I hope it can somehow be modified to fit any other supported language. Despite the functionality you ask has not been explicitly developed yet, I think I found a different (hopefully less clunky) way to access CloudBlockBlob data from a ListBlobItem element.
The following code can be used to delete, for example, every blob inside a specific directory.
String blobUri;
CloudBlobClient blobClient = /* Obtain your blob client */
try{
CloudBlobContainer container = /* Obtain your blob container */
for (ListBlobItem blobItem : container.listBlobs(blobPrefix)) {
if (blobItem instanceof CloudBlob) {
blob = (CloudBlob) blobItem;
if (blob.exists()){
System.out.println("Deleting blob " + blob.getName());
blob.delete();
}
}
}
}catch (URISyntaxException | StorageException ex){
Logger.getLogger(BlobOperations.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}
The previous answers are good. I just wanted to point out 2 things:
1) Nowadays ASYNC programming is recommended to do and supported by Azure SDK as well. So try to use it:
CloudBlobDirectory dir = container.GetDirectoryReference(dirPath);
var blobs = dir.ListBlobs(true);
foreach (IListBlobItem item in blobs)
{
CloudBlockBlob blob = (CloudBlockBlob)item;
await blob.FetchAttributesAsync(); //Use async calls...
}
2) Fetching Metadata in a separate call is not efficient. The code makes 2 HTTP request per blob object. ListBlobs() method supports getting Metadata with as well in one call by setting BlobListingDetails parameter:
CloudBlobDirectory dir = container.GetDirectoryReference(dirPath);
var blobs = dir.ListBlobs(useFlatBlobListing: true, blobListingDetails: BlobListingDetails.Metadata);
I recommend to use second code it it is possible. Since it is the most efficient way to fetch Metadata.
Related
These are great guides for migrating between the different versions of NuGet package:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/blob/Azure.Storage.Blobs_12.6.0/sdk/storage/Azure.Storage.Blobs/README.md
https://elcamino.cloud/articles/2020-03-30-azure-storage-blobs-net-sdk-v12-upgrade-guide-and-tips.html
However I am struggling to migrate the following concepts in my code:
// Return if a directory exists:
container.GetDirectoryReference(path).ListBlobs().Any();
where GetDirectoryReference is not understood and there appears to be no direct translation.
Also, the concept of a CloudBlobDirectory does not appear to have made it into Azure.Storage.Blobs e.g.
private static long GetDirectorySize(CloudBlobDirectory directoryBlob) {
long size = 0;
foreach (var blobItem in directoryBlob.ListBlobs()) {
if (blobItem is BlobClient)
size += ((BlobClient) blobItem).GetProperties().Value.ContentLength;
if (blobItem is CloudBlobDirectory)
size += GetDirectorySize((CloudBlobDirectory) blobItem);
}
return size;
}
where CloudBlobDirectory does not appear anywhere in the API.
There's no such thing as physical directories or folders in Azure Blob Storage. The directories you sometimes see are part of the blob (e.g. folder1/folder2/file1.txt). The List Blobs requests allows you to add a prefix and delimiter in a call, which are used by the Azure Portal and Azure Data Explorer to create a visualization of folders. As example prefix folder1/ and delimiter / would allow you to see the content as if folder1 was opened.
That's exactly what happens in your code. The GetDirectoryReference() adds a prefix. The ListBlobs() fires a request and Any() checks if any items return.
For V12 the command that'll allow you to do the same would be GetBlobsByHierarchy and its async version. In your particular case where you only want to know if any blobs exist in the directory a GetBlobs with prefix would also suffice.
I'm trying to get the AccessTier of blobs. I use the following code snippet:
var blobContainerClient = _blobServiceClient.GetBlobContainerClient("container-name");
await foreach (var blobItem in blobContainerClient.GetBlobsAsync(BlobTraits.All, BlobStates.All))
{
Console.WriteLine(blobItem.Properties.AccessTier)
}
The issue I'm running into is that AccessTier is always null.
I've also tried to get properties explicitly, like:
var properties = blobContainerClient.GetBlobClient(blobItem.Name).GetProperties().Value.AccessTier;
But still it's null. Is there a way to get AccessTier using Azure .NET SDK?
I noticed that the issue is my storage account's type is V1 and in V1 tiers are not supported.
I've been facing a very strange problem in Realm which doesn't occur every time , but it's been really annoying.
I'm saving a lot of information offline which come from a Webservice using realm. I don't get any exception while saving all these information.
Later I'm able to get all these objects by accessing them through MyObject.allObjects().
These objects contains a property which is an UUID, which I use to download the file related to this object and save it locally, after I finish downloading the file, I update my Realm Object with the path of the file, but some times when I do it:
let pred = NSPredicate(format: "UUID = %#", fileId)
print("This is the select \(pred.predicateFormat)")
let results = IssueFile.objects(with: pred) as! RLMResults<IssueFile>
The variable results is empty, but if I check Realm Database via Realm Browser, I can find the item I'm looking for.
So my question is: why some times Realm can't find the object I'm selecting? As I'm saving a lot of information, is there something I should change in the Realm Configuration?
I've already set the UUID as primary key of the table:
+ (NSString *)primaryKey {
return #"UUID";
}
Thanks,
I have a Azure Storage account with several containers. I am using BlobTrigger Function to detect new blobs.
Now this is seems working perfectly. But a BlobTrigger only works on one container. Seems like a bad idea to create one trigger pr container (I will duplicate a lot of code).
Is there any way to simplify this? Ideas are appreciated.
PS: I know that BlobTrigger is not reliable if there are 10K blobs or more in the container (but this is not my case).
Is there any way to simplify this? Ideas are appreciated.
An Azure Storage blob trigger only lets you monitor one storage container for new and updated blobs. If you want to monitor multi containers in a Azure Storage Account, you need to create multi functions.
I suggest you write the blob changed processing logic in one method and invoke this method when other functions are called.
public static void ProcessBlob(string containerName, string blobName, CloudBlockBlob blob)
{
//Write your logic here
}
public static void ProcessBlobContainer1([BlobTrigger("container1/{blobName}")] CloudBlockBlob blob, string blobName)
{
ProcessBlob("container1", blobName, blob);
}
public static void ProcessBlobContainer2([BlobTrigger("container2/{blobName}")] CloudBlockBlob blob, string blobName)
{
ProcessBlob("container2", blobName, blob);
}
There is open issue on GitHub which related to your question, hoping that it will be solved soon.
Add ability to create blob triggers on a container names that match a pattern
As I know SQL Server since version 2012 has a new feature, FileTable. It allows us to store files in the file system and to use them from T-SQL.
I am trying to use this feature and I have no idea how to do it properly.
Generally, I don't know how to access files stored in the file table. Let's suppose I have asp.net MVC app and there are a lot of images which I show on web pages in img tags. I would like to store these images in Filetable and access them as files from the filesystem. But I don't know where these files are stored and how to use them as files. Now my images are stored in web application directory in folder images and I write something like this:
<img src='/images/mypicture.png' />
And if I move my images to file table what I should write in src?
<img src='path-toimage-in-filetable' />
I don't think you still need this, anyways I'll post my answer for anyone else interested.
First, a filetable still being a table, so, if you want to access to data from it you need to use a Select SQL statement. So you'd need something like:
select name, file_stream from filetable_name
where
name = 'file_name',
file_type = 'file_extension'
just execute an statement like this in your asp.net app, then fetch the results and use the file_stream column to get the binary data of the stored file. If you want to retrieve the file from HTML, first you need to create an action in your controller, which will return the retrieved file:
public ActionResult GetFile(){
..
return File(file.file_stream,file.file_type);
}
After this, put in you HTML tag something like:
<img src="/controller/GetFile" />
hope this could help!
If you want to know the schema of a filetable see
here
I assume by FileTable you actually mean FileStream. A couple notes about that:
This feature is best used if your files are actually files
The files should be, on average, greater than 1mb - although there can be exceptions to this rule, if they're smaller than 1mb on average, you may be better off using a VARBINARY(MAX) or XML data type as appropriate. If your images are very small on average (only a few KB), consider using a VARBINARY(MAX) column.
Accessing these files will require an open transaction and that the database is properly configured for FILESTREAM
You can get some significant advantages bypassing the normal SQL engine/database file method of data access by telling SQL Server that you want to access the file directly, however it's not meant for directly accessing the file on the file system and attempting to do so can break SQL's management of these files (transactional consistency, tracking, locking, etc.).
It's pretty likely that your use case here would be better served by using a CDN and storing image URLs in the table if you really need SQL for this. You can use FILESTREAM to do this (see code sample below for one implementation), but you'll be hammering your SQL server for every request unless you store the images somewhere else anyway that the browser can properly cache (my example doesn't do that) - and if you store them somewhere else for rendering int he browser you might as well store them there to begin with (you won't have transactional consistency for those images once they're copied to some other drive/disk/location anyway).
With all that said, here's an example of how you'd access the FILESTREAM data using ADO.NET:
public static string connectionString = ...; // get your connection string from encrypted config
// assumes your FILESTREAM data column is called Img in a table called ImageTable
const string sql = #"
SELECT
Img.PathName(),
GET_FILESTREAM_TRANSACTION_CONTEXT()
FROM ImageTagble
WHERE ImageId = #id";
public string RetreiveImage(int id)
{
string serverPath;
byte[] txnToken;
string base64ImageData = null;
using (var ts = new TransactionScope())
{
using (var conn = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
conn.Open();
using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sql, conn))
{
cmd.Parameters.Add("#id", SqlDbType.Int).Value = id;
using (SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader())
{
rdr.Read();
serverPath = rdr.GetSqlString(0).Value;
txnToken = rdr.GetSqlBinary(1).Value;
}
}
using (var sfs = new SqlFileStream(serverPath, txnToken, FileAccess.Read))
{
// sfs will now work basically like a FileStream. You can either copy it locally or return it as a base64 encoded string
using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
sfs.CopyTo(ms);
base64ImageData = Convert.ToBase64String(ms.ToArray());
}
}
}
ts.Complete();
// assume this is PNG image data, replace PNG with JPG etc. as appropraite. Might store in table if it will vary...
return "data:img/png;base64," + base64ImageData;
}
}
Obviously, if you have lots of images to handle like this this is not an ideal method - don't try to make an instance of SQL server into what you should be using a CDN for.... However, if you have other really good reasons, you should try to grab as many images as possible in a single request/transaction (e.g. if you know you're displaying 50 images on a page, get all 50 with a single transaction scope, don't use 50 transaction scopes - this code won't handle that).