PHP-Azure Migration - Part 3

In the previous post, we have fixed all database queries to make the web site start working in SQL Server. The next task is tackling the file I/O without the file system. The file system is not a permanent storage in Windows Azure. We need to copy all resource files (file attachments of articles) from the local file system to Azure Storage.

File Migration
The migration seemed quite straight forward. We can just copying the file to Azure Storage. However, there is no FTP or any batch utilities from Microsoft for batch upload. Given we have 4GB of files with some hierarchical directories, it is infeasible to the files one by one. We used Cloud Storage Studio for the migration.

URL Redirection
The web site and the resource files are now in different servers. We can no longer use relative path. However, since the database is storing the relative path of the resource files, we either change the data (as well as semantics) to store the absolute URIs of the resource files; or redirect the browser to get the files from the correct URLs.

As changing the data would involve a lot of testings in business logics, we decided to create a ASP.NET Module to redirect the requests. Given that

1. IIS (as well as Windows Azure) allow us to call ASP.NET Module in any web site (including PHP web site)
2. All files were stored in a particular folder so we could derive the redirect pattern easily

Now, all existing files have been migrated and will be redirected to new URL. Next time, let's take a look how to deal with new uploaded files.