I am exploring the possibility of adding a feature to my Rails-based intranet site that allows users to upload files.
Two goals: My users are widely distributed by geography and do not always work with documents in a shared network storage (different addresses, DNS records, etc. out of my control or interest), so I'm thinking of providing an alternative database. We have several files from which we analyze data on the client side. I would prefer to be able to push this to the server.
I looked at attachment_fu, Paperclip and another (forgot the name!), All of which seem very image-oriented, although attachment_fu can at least work without an image processing library, thank goodness.
The big problem is that my server does not allow my application to write files locally, and these plugins seem to want to create a Tempfile.
Questions (finally!)
Is there a reasonable way to download binary data and process it in memory and / or save it as a BLOB without saving the file on the server side?
Or should I abandon the idea of distributing files and provide users with a second option for copying and pasting text fields, where possible?
(The closest I could find on SO was this , which really doesn't help)