Saving image with mongoose

Question

I know there are quite a few threads on this topic already, but unfortunately I didn't find my answer until now. I use angular.js with the example code from http://angular-js.in/image-upload/ to get the image from the client. This part works

Now to the node/mongodb part, here's my backend model:

var userSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
    avatar: { data: Buffer, contentType: String },
    // ...
});

module.exports = mongoose.model('User', userSchema);

and my node code:

exports.createAvatar = function (req, res) {
  var avatar = {
    data: req.body.data.image, // see below
    contentType: 'image/png'
  }

  models.DUser
    .findById(index.findUserId(req))
    .exec(function (err, user) {
      user.avatar = avatar;
      // ...
      user.save(function (err, user) {/* ... */ });

and my angularCtrl:

var foo = {
  image: image,
  imageName: image.name,
};

$http.post('/api/users', {data: foo })
    .success(function (result) { /*...*/ });

Beside from req.body.data.image I tried many different variations like req.body.data.image.dataURL, req.body.data.image.dataURL.data, but nothing worked so far. My Logging of req.body.data.image shows:

{ file: 
   { webkitRelativePath: '',
     lastModified: 1411073963000,
     lastModifiedDate: '2014-09-18T20:59:23.000Z',
     name: '3770316278.png',
     type: 'image/png',
     size: 32493 },
  url: 'blob:http%3A//127.0.0.1%3A3000/cb20debc-8a3a-468f-ab5c-39299f7ec52b',
  dataURL: 'data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAASwAAACHCAYAAAC.....

How can I save the image to the database?

edit

I tried to save everything after base64, from req.body.data.image.dataURL into the avatar like this:

var split = req.body.data.image.dataURL.split('base64,');
var type = split[0];
var data = split[1];

var avatar = {
    data: type,
    contentType:'image/png'
};

the save message is still:

user.avatar = avatar
user.save(function (err, user) {}

But I still get the error

TypeError: Cannot set property 'avatar' of null

---

since my question changed a bit, I'm marking this one as solved, the new question is here: Displaying Images in Angular.js from MongoDB

Answer 1

You know, definitely it's not the best way to save image data on mongo. Instead you can save your image on any directory on your server and save only url of your file, like..

mongoose-model.js

avatar : {
    type : String
}

and on your main script you should get

let avatar_url = '/path/to/uploads/' + req.body.data.image.file.name

something like this