Topic awaiting preservation: Uploading images w/ uploaded CSV info

Hey,

I've got a function that I'm writing that uploads a CSV file and populates the DB with some of the CSV info; I've got that all working just fine. The problem I've run into is I would like to upload additional files (images) depending upon the location set within the CSV file. Is there a way to tell PHP to look on the users machine for the path given? So what I have is...

1. CSV is uploaded
2. DB is updated with info, including local path (according to the users network)
3. PHP tries to upload the images according to the path given but it's not working, I'm assuming this is because it is looking for the image files on the server.

I've tested the upload functionality in all other cases and it works perfectly. Is this something that can't be done?

This is not possible for obvious security reasons. Imagine if any website could fetch a file on end users' machine

The only solution would be to have a webserver running on the users' network and exposing the path containing the images. But I guess the location are pretty random and the server should work only for images and require an HTTP AUTH. But even there's a big privacy concern.

You'd rather have the users upload a ZIP with the files they need, or do that in 2 passes: first the upload of the CSV, then a FORM with as many FILE upload as required and an em informing the user of the local path you saw in the CSV file.

poi is right.

Now if you really really need to do this... a custom signed java applet with security privileges to access the local machine, parsing parts of the csv on the local machine, and doing a load of file uploads from that is they way... but that's a lot of trouble.

Thanks for the info... I like poi's idea of having it a "two-step" process.

just be careful of too many file uploads at a time

yes, php has a 2 mbyte upload limit by default.

This is where/when I'm looking forward for low level network API and file API ( prompting the user to grant any kind of action the first time it's attempted ) in JS. This would be a major kick for web Apps. and widgets.