A Nunemaker Joint

Since The Changelog has already scooped me (darn those guys are fast), I figured I should post something here as well. Last December I posted Getting a Grip on GridFS. Basically, I liked what Grip was doing, but made a few tweaks. Grip’s development has continued, but it is headed down a bit different path, so I thought it might be confusing to keep my fork named the same.

Today, I did some more work on the project and now that it is unrecognizable when compared to Grip, I renamed it to Joint. Yes, I realize that I now have gems named crack and joint. Joint is a tiny piece of code that joins MongoMapper and the new Ruby GridFS API.

Usage

What I love about joint is its simplicity. Simply declare the attachment and you are good to go.

class Asset
  include MongoMapper::Document
  plugin Joint # add the plugin

  attachment :file # declare an attachment named image
end

With that simple declaration, you get #file and #file= instance methods and several keys (file_id, file_name, file_type, and file_size). The #file instance method returns a simple proxy to make the API a bit prettier and sends all other calls on the proxy to the GridIO instance.

asset = Asset.create(:file => params[:file])
asset.file.id   # GridFS Object Id
asset.file.name # file name
asset.file.type # mime type as determined by wand gem
asset.file.size # size in bytes

There is no limit to the number of attachments, but each attachment uses 4 keys so I would not add more than one or two (more is a sign you are doing something wrong). As mentioned in the comment above, it uses my wand project to determine the mime type.

For those that are not familiar with wand (as I have not posted here about it), it first attempts to determine the mime type using the mime-types gem. If that fails to returning anything, it drops down to the unix file command.

What It Does Not Do

Anything else. All joint handles is assigning a file and storing it in GridFS. It doesn’t do versions, resizing, etc. For this type of stuff, I would recommend imagery with some HTTP caching (varnish, et el.) sitting in front of it.

I can certainly see having some triggers (callbacks) at some point such as after jointed or something for when you do want to do post processing. I’ll leave that for a rainy day though.