From: John W Higgins <john@...>
Date: 2003-11-04T07:17:33+09:00
Subject: Re: CGI uses file size to distinguish between regular values and	files

The original response from Simon Kitching was the best on this topic.
You are trying to access a private implementation object instead of the
public object. It looks like all the CGI.rb API guarantees you is an IO
object from which you can access the uploads. If the writer of the class
wishes to use a regular file, or a tempfile, or StringIO or whatever
other subclasses of the IO superclass that really is up to them. You are
trying to "cheat" (couldn't think of a better word) by grabbing the
tempfile instead of using the generic IO methods of read or write. Yes,
there is no question that a tempfile is easier to use if you want to
copy the data - however, I'm sure that from a performance standard - the
author has decided that the overhead of a tempfile shouldn't be incurred
by the average user when the length of the data is below the 10240
character threshold. It's like 99.9% of performance decisions made with
something like this - it will never please everyone all the time -
however, I think the author made a pretty good decision and I can't
imagine it's that difficult to do a 

File.open(upload, 'w') {|f| f.write(file.read) }

which would work under both circumstances. If you find that you
performance suffers greatly by this then I would look to superclassing
CGI and making the trivial modification required to force the use of
Tempfiles. 

Ruby offers soooo many choices to do any particular task that we all
have to realize that the authors of the various modules have to make
decisions that they believe will meet our requirements. That said, it's
so simple to make the changes that you need that I would spend my time
superclassing CGI and moving onto better things. 

John W Higgins
john@wishdev.com

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 12:58, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Nov 2003 04:44:50 +0900, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Sort of. I want it to work that way in the default CGI library. There should 
> be no distinction for the user who just wants the data. I *still* want to be 
> able to access the resulting Tempfile, though, if I'm deciding to do 
> file-based storage instead of, say, database storage. That way, I don't need 
> to write the data, but can tell the OS to copy the file.
> 
> -austin
> --
> austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
> software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.11.03
>                                          * 15.56.30
> 
> 
> 
> 
>