mongoDB as a file storage for Grails application

Question

I've recently came across a need to store a higher amount of files in my application and because PaaS platform used to host the application provides mongo, I've would like to use it.

However because I'm quite inexperienced with mongo I have almost no idea what is the current state of mongo related plugins and tools for grails. What should I use? As I want to keep domain classes in SQL database and use mongo only to store related files (in this case it will be mostly a bunch of PDFs and text documents related to domain instance) the mongoDB ORM [1] plugin seems too "heavy". Unfortunately mongoDB ORM is probably the only mongo plugin for grails in active development at the moment.

In short, what would be the best plugin / library tool-set for this purpose? The closest thing that matches my need I've found is grails-mongo-files plugin [2], which is probably a little bit outdated with no further development.So far it seems that I will have to use mongo's java driver (or the gmongo wrapper) and write some storage service and taglib by myself (what is not necessary a bad thing).

[1] http://grails.org/plugin/mongodb

[2] https://github.com/quirklabs/grails-mongo-file

Answer 1

There is also the mongodb gridfs plugin. http://grails.org/plugin/mongodb-gridfs

One thing to consider is that gridfs effectively does two calls to mongo, one to retrieve file information and one to retrieve the file. So it might not be a good fit if your files are under 16 megabytes.

Here is a post on how to do this manually if you want to bypass plugins - http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/171