Uploading multiple files

Sometimes, you want to a form to accept multiple files at one time. For instance, you want to upload multiple pictures of a product, or multiple documents associated to a particular contract...

BCE has a special field descriptor that allows you to do this.

First of all, the basics:

• Your main bean will contain many files
• Therefore, there is a 1..* relationship between your files and your main bean
• In BCE, each file is stored on the disk, and a reference to that file is stored in database
• So you need a table that contains the list of files, with a foreign key pointing to the main bean

Let's assume we are making a database containing products and that each product has several photos. The data model would look like this:

As you can see, the "files" table contains a foreign key pointing to the "products" table, and a column containing the name of the file to be stored.

Getting started

Multiple file upload in a bean is done via a special field descriptor in BCE: FileMultiUploaderFieldDescriptor. Therefore, to add a file upload field to your form, you need to add a FileMultiUploaderFieldDescriptor to your BCEForm.

Here are the important fields to fill:

• label: This is the label of the field
• description: A small description displayed below the field
• folder: The folder (relative to ROOT_PATH) where the files are stored. It should not start and should not end with a slash. Please note that the files are not stored directly in this folder. Instead, a sub-folder will be created for each main bean. The name of the directoy is the ID of the main bean.
• fileDao: An instance of the DAO pointing to the tables containing the files. Your table does not need to be called "files" by the way.
• filePathMethod: The name of the method of the fileDao that returns the list of the file beans. This method signature must be: ~~~ function filePathMethod($beanId) ~~~
• filePathGetter: The name of the getter of the fileBean that gets the path of the file on the disk. The path of the file must be relative to the ROOT_PATH constant. The path must not start with a /.
• filePathSetter: The name of the setter of the fileBean bean used to set the file name. The parameter passed to this setter must be relative to ROOT_PATH. The path must not start with a /.
• fkSetter: The name of the setter of the file bean that will set the ID of the main bean. The parameter passed to this setter is the ID of the main bean.
• fileUploaderWidget: This must point to an instance of a SimpleFileUploaderWidget. This class is used to display the HTML5 file uploader.
• fieldName: The name of the field that will be used in the HTML "input" element.
• renderer: TODO: why do we have a fileUploaderWidget AND a renderer? Can we not have only one???

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