When I started playing with the LightSwitch HTML bits, my first experiment was to try to recreate a professional mobile site.
After only a couple of minutes (minus the many hours spent creating a JQuery slider for LightSwitch first), the result looked like this (professional corporate mobile site on the left, 3 minutes of LightSwitch on the right):
The entire thing was done fiddling around in the IDE on a single screen on queries on the same entity. This entity had simple properties like “Name”, “IsFeaturedInSlider”, “Link” and “ImageToShow”…
About that last property: in the SL client we all found it quite logical that an “ImageToShow” property, as a business type, was stored as an “Image” (data type: binary). In the new HTML client however, you can have an entity of business type “Image”, “String” or “Web address”…
And for each of these properties, you can select an “Image” control in the IDE…
So here’s the question (under the assumption that you can choose – no existing data…): what field do you use to store an Image?
My personal and totally unfounded opinion: I’m a fan of storing my images as “Image”, because of the out-of-the-box support in the SL client. However if and only if I’m absolutely sure there will never be need for this support, then I rather store them as a “Web Address”. When stored as a simple url, a browser will actually be smart enough to cache the images locally and not re-fetch them every time, thus gaining a small but sometimes crucial performance gain.
What’s your take on this? Leave a comment below if you agree, or disagree. (Or just want to say hi 🙂 )
Keep rocking LS!
Jan Van der Haegen's blog 
For me, web address but not forgetting to support localized images 😉 (hint)
Interesting, but I completely forgot! Localization wasn’t supported before, so never had to think about it before… Need new habits 🙂
Hi Jan,
I follow your materials whenever there is something new. Most of what you do is way beyond me but I try to keep up.
This is probably not the right place for this, but I am a little desperate and didn’t know how else to contact you. I have a bug/strange problem with my Lightswitch OOB application as it keeps hanging randomly. Here is the link to a post I made on the forums.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/lightswitch/thread/ede70053-40d7-4ffe-a4b6-557980147db4
Any help/pointer would be much appreciated. Many many thanks in advance.
Best regards,
CT
PS: I see you enjoyed yourself in Cambodia and Thailand, do swing by Malaysia next time (where I’m from)
PPS: Do delete this post if you see it doesn’t fit with this posting..
hi Jan nice job !
but where is the search bar like i use to see the silvelight lightswitch.
am i missing something ?
Hi Jan, I have already adopted the uri approach when I though it was better from SL era and I also created SL controls in CLASS Extensions to support it. But, there is one more issue other than localization xpert360 mentioned and that is permissions. I know you can assign permissions to the images folder to allow only the hosting service account to read but imho in any case that security is critical you cannot beat the security a blob stored in a database can provide. One con for blobs is if one uses SQL Express the filesize limit that can easily be reached but you can get over this also by filesteam storage, which by the way gives you the option to mix blobs with uris.
Other than that I agree that caching is a major benefit provided that your images are not actual content that can be modified but you can also solve this by storing immutable images to a different folder that the “content/editable” ones and set the expiration policy accordingly.
Pingback: Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness
Pingback: Beth Massi的中文博客
But How do you add image when adding record ussing add edit screen. i cannt find any option from where i can browse image to upload