Attachments

Attachments are binary data files that can be attachment to an RxDocument, like a file that is attached to an email.

Using attachments instead of adding the data to the normal document, ensures that you still have a good performance when querying and writing documents, even when a big amount of data, like an image file has to be stored.

• You can store string, binary files, images and whatever you want side by side with your documents.
• Deleted documents automatically loose all their attachments data.
• Not all replication plugins support the replication of attachments.
• Attachments can be stored encrypted.

Internally, attachments in RxDB are stored and handled similar to how CouchDB, PouchDB does it.

Add the attachments plugin

To enable the attachments, you have to add the attachments plugin.

import { addRxPlugin } from 'rxdb';
import { RxDBAttachmentsPlugin } from 'rxdb/plugins/attachments';
addRxPlugin(RxDBAttachmentsPlugin);

Enable attachments in the schema

Before you can use attachments, you have to ensure that the attachments-object is set in the schema of your RxCollection.

const mySchema = {
    version: 0,
    type: 'object',
    properties: {
        // .
        // .
        // .
    },
    attachments: {
        encrypted: true // if true, the attachment-data will be encrypted with the db-password
    }
};

const myCollection = await myDatabase.addCollections({
    humans: {
        schema: mySchema
    }
});

putAttachment()

Adds an attachment to a RxDocument. Returns a Promise with the new attachment.

import { createBlob } from 'rxdb';

const attachment = await myDocument.putAttachment(
    {
        id: 'cat.txt',     // (string) name of the attachment
        data: createBlob('meowmeow', 'text/plain'),   // (string|Blob) data of the attachment
        type: 'text/plain'    // (string) type of the attachment-data like 'image/jpeg'
    }
);

getAttachment()

Returns an RxAttachment by its id. Returns null when the attachment does not exist.

const attachment = myDocument.getAttachment('cat.jpg');

allAttachments()

Returns an array of all attachments of the RxDocument.

const attachments = myDocument.allAttachments();

allAttachments$

Gets an Observable which emits a stream of all attachments from the document. Re-emits each time an attachment gets added or removed from the RxDocument.

const all = [];
myDocument.allAttachments$.subscribe(
    attachments => all = attachments
);

RxAttachment

The attachments of RxDB are represented by the type RxAttachment which has the following attributes/methods.

doc

The RxDocument which the attachment is assigned to.

id

The id as string of the attachment.

type

The type as string of the attachment.

length

The length of the data of the attachment as number.

digest

The hash of the attachments data as string.

note

The digest is NOT calculated by RxDB, instead it is calculated by the RxStorage. The only guarantee is that the digest will change when the attachments data changes.

rev

The revision-number of the attachment as number.

remove()

Removes the attachment. Returns a Promise that resolves when done.

const attachment = myDocument.getAttachment('cat.jpg');
await attachment.remove();

getData()

Returns a Promise which resolves the attachment's data as Blob. (async)

const attachment = myDocument.getAttachment('cat.jpg');
const blob = await attachment.getData();

getStringData()

Returns a Promise which resolves the attachment's data as string.

const attachment = await myDocument.getAttachment('cat.jpg');
const data = await attachment.getStringData();

Attachment compression

Storing many attachments can be a problem when the disc space of the device is exceeded. Therefore it can make sense to compress the attachments before storing them in the RxStorage. With the attachments-compression plugin you can compress the attachments data on write and decompress it on reads. This happens internally and will now change on how you use the api. The compression is run with the Compression Streams API which is only supported on newer browsers.

import {
    wrappedAttachmentsCompressionStorage
} from 'rxdb/plugins/attachments-compression';

import { getRxStorageIndexedDB } from 'rxdb-premium/plugins/storage-indexeddb';

// create a wrapped storage with attachment-compression.
const storageWithAttachmentsCompression = wrappedAttachmentsCompressionStorage({
    storage: getRxStorageIndexedDB()
});

const db = await createRxDatabase({
    name: 'mydatabase',
    storage: storageWithAttachmentsCompression
});


// set the compression mode at the schema level
const mySchema = {
    version: 0,
    type: 'object',
    properties: {
        // .
        // .
        // .
    },
    attachments: {
        compression: 'deflate'  // <- Specify the compression mode here. OneOf ['deflate', 'gzip']
    }
};

/* ... create your collections as usual and store attachments in them. */