Retrieving images from a dabatase in ASP.NET MVC

Published by

Ricardo Sanchez

April 3, 2012

If you run into a ASP.NET MVC site that needs to get images stored as binary data in a SQL database you can do the following to help you read these images and display them in your view.

The Controller

First, create a controller that will serve these images and add a void method that requires the image id as parameter to locate the right image to serve. In the example below I used the Adventure Works database and Linq to query the database and read an image stored in MS SQL. Make sure you set the content type to the right type of image file you’ll be getting from the database, in the example below I used “image/gif” as the content type.

The View

In your view, you only need to use the Url.Action helper to form the url to the image stored in the database by calling the method in the image controller you just created (see above).

“Show” is the name of our method and “Image” is the name of the controller, what’s on the right to “id=” is just the image id that I want to get.

6 responses to “Retrieving images from a dabatase in ASP.NET MVC”

hareesh

January 25, 2013

this is good for dispalying single image we want to dispaly all the images from the table what should i write…….

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Ricardo

January 25, 2013

The code above will work, you’ll just need to make some changes to the query so it pulls all images instead of one image and then in the view wrap the existing code with a loop.

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1. hareesh
  
  January 26, 2013
  
  thanks Ricardo for replay…
  I worked as u told ,i pulled all the images with query, and in view using for
  each loop .display all the images……but it showing the error as model isnot suitable ….can u please post that code
  
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chandra kanth

January 30, 2013

i have stored some images in binaryformat now i want to display that in a page with out using Linq how to do?

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tabrez

July 30, 2016

if i am using SQL SERVER then what should i write instead of “AdventureWorksEntities” ???

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1. ricardodsanchez
  
  August 1, 2016
  
  The line of code AdventureWorksEntities _data = new AdventureWorksEntities(); refers to an entity model object. By the way, I will use dependency injection (DI) these days as opposed to creating an instance of the entity model object as I did it in the example. For more details on dependency injection read this.
  
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