Pure PHP Upload Tutorials - To Organized Folder

Upload to Organized Folder

Many users have asked me how to use this new feature of Pure PHP Upload for organizing the uploaded files in different folders. In this tutorial I will explain how is that is to do.

In sites where many files are going to be uploaded you often need a better way to organize them then just upload all in one and same folder.

Lets take as example an intranet site where you will be uploading photo's of all employees. You want those photo's to be organized in different folders dependend on the employee's department. The folder structure you want is like this:

How to do it

To make the file upload to an organized folder, you need to:

  1. Start with basic upload page
    Start with an upload page where you have Pure PHP Upload on it. If you haven't done it yet, go through the Simple file upload tutorial.

  2. Extend the upload form with Department selection field
    You can edit now the basic form and add some more form fields to it:



    As you can see I've add a Department field. This is a drop down list that includes all the departments we have. As values I've selected the same strings as the department names. I will use the name of the department to make the upload folder name.



  3. Open the Pure PHP Upload dialog
    Select the Pure PHP Upload dialog by opening the Server Behaviors panel. Select DMXzone - Pure PHP Upload.

  4. Enter the variable folder
    When you need to use a variable folder, you can enter any expression you want in the Upload Folder field. In my example another form field contains the Departments.

    5. So I need the following upload folder expression:

    "Employees/" .$HTTP_POST_VARS['Department']

    this will create a new directory for every non existed department and will place there the photos of each employee that belongs to that department! Non existent folders will be auto-created so this is really powerful! You only need to setup the security on the main Upload folder, for more info how to do this read the Setting the folder security on your server tutorial.

    Since PHP version 4.1.0 it is also posible to use $_SESSION and $_POST.
    DMX 2004 uses $_SESSION and $_POST as a default.
    You can read more detailed info about reserved variables online at php.net.

    You might also check the Prefix With Full Path option. This option will store the full path in your database (if you are saving the filename in a database). So it will be easy to retrieve a list of all files later on.

  5. Save and done
    Save your page and upload it to your server, and you are done! Go to your website and test it - you should be able to upload any file to a dynamic folder.