Advise required re: uploading files to server

Rollo Tamasi

hello,
I will soon be writting a php script which allows a user to upload mp3s to a server. The user needs to enter their 'name' , 'email', 'track name', and 'description' into a form , as well as selecting the file for upload before uploading. The form information is stored within a mysql database and the file is upload to a dir on the server. All the fields are required, and the only file that can be uploaded is of .mp3 extension. I expect the average file size to be in the 80mb region. As a result i have some issues.

Lets say it takes about 20 minutes to upload a mp3, i will need some visual repesentation to show a progress bar, so ajax is a obvious contender. Does anyone know of another way to do this without using ajax?

Would it be best to have the form require the 4 fields (name, email, track name and description) on page 1, validate those fields, and then ask for the upload on page 2 due to the time it would take to upload the mp3? I have written a test php file for this and i have all the forms on the one page at the moment.

I will more than likely dynamically generate the page urls to avoid people skiping to page 2 and the like. To avoid someone uploading the same track twice or person x having the same track title as person y on the server i think i will alter the filename on upload. I will add a hash value to the mp3 title. I can probably validate this too fairly easily too actually.

What other secuirty, validation issues would i need to consider? Is a 80mb file too large to upload in this manner? What would you do? Suggestions please.

Thanks

Webmonkey

An old work colleague that i used to work with said that PHP can't support something like that? He used a Perl script instead working with the PHP script to show the status of an upload.

Rollo Tamasi

php on its own can't but combained with ajax it can. i doubt i could use a flash file to indicate the upload progress either so ajax is probably the only option unless i use a perl script to conduct the upload but i'm not familar with perl.

Webmonkey

Yeah well sorry couldn't be more of a help. Perl though is not that hard to learn its very similer to php by syntax actually.

Check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/megaupload/

Rollo Tamasi

i have seen that before, its nice. I might examine it further when i get closer to the date when i require the upload script

misterq

It is perl based but I found it very good with large files and pretty easy to embed it into a php form via iframe to combine it with a database insert:
http://encodable.com/tech/ajaxupload/

R

Rollo Tamasi

cheers.