Overall Structure & Background

Traditionally, file uploading has not been easy or clean when implementing within a web browser. A popular approach to uploading file has been to send files and the submitted form (related information) simultaneously. In its basic form, you press the send (submit) button and you wait, wait, and wait some more. Unfortunately, this is because web browsers do not have the ability to receive any progress information.

As a developer, you want to be able to empower your users and to be able to answer questions before they even ask them.  For example, “How much longer is this upload going to take?” or “How much of my file has already been sent or uploaded?”  Standard ASP.NET does not allow you to answer these questions.   Additionally, ASP.NET is built in such way that all client requests are kept in memory as one data thread. In many cases, this allows improved system performance and reduced time it takes to process each request. However, when you upload large files, your application and system performance will go down proportionally to file size.  This is because more memory and processor power is required to process these requests.

The Figure below illustrates the common/standard file upload approach.

With Mediachase FileUploader.NET, the common file upload approach/schema is extended with many new features such as:

1. Uploading files without requiring page submitting. In this way, you can upload a file and edit related information simultaneously.
2. View full progress information: progress, current file name, transfer rate, estimated time, time remaining and many others.
3. Allow a user to cancel a file upload that is in progress.
4. Show uploaded file list and allow it to be edited (add new file, delete).
5. Allow for Multi-file uploads.
6. Provide for optimized file upload. i.e. When you press the save button, the files are already uploaded to the server and waiting.

Using the Mediachase FileUploader.NET control, your page can look like this, which is from one of our working samples included in the package:

The Figure below illustrates the Mediachase FileUploader.NET file upload approach/schema.