Is it good to store dynamically created file's paths in database ?

Question

HI

This is in reference with my earlier question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2361723/how-to-organize-files-created-dynamically-using-php

I edited the question , with one more aspect, that is storing paths in to the DB.are there any advantages or disadvantages of doing this ?

Answer 1

How else are you going to find the file?

Answer 2

If you have no other way of finding the file, storing its path in the DB is probably OK.

Still, a couple of notes :

• I would generally try to see if I could "guess" the file's path from another field -- for instance, from the primary key
  • If it's possible, then, there is no need to store the path in the DB, as it would be some redundant information
• I would, as much as possible, store some relative path, and not an absolute one.
  • For instance, I would store images/my/image-test.png
  • But not /var/www/images/my/image-test.png
  • That way, moving the directory with the images to another place, or changing of server, using a new one with another path to the DocumentRoot, would still be OK and not break my application.