My question may be simple, but I find myself a bit puzzled. In my application, whenever a user clicks on an image's thumbnail, the ID of that thumbnail is sent to a controller action using AJAX:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult GetHiResImage(string thumbnailID)
{
Guid id = new Guid(thumbnailID);
try
{
using (var db = new ImagesDbContext())
{
var image = db.Images.Where(x => x.ImageID == id).Select(x => x).Single();
return File(image.ImageData, image.ImageMimeType);
}
}
catch (Exception e) { }
return Json("An error occurred while trying to retrieve the image from the database.");
}
With this code in place, it seems like the client does receive the image, but nothing actually happens.
I am aiming to provide the full-sized image to the client without having to redirect or refresh the page, yet I can't seem to figure out how to achieve this. My goal is for the image to appear in a new window or tab, and I'm exploring which type of FileResult (such as FileResult, FileStreamResult, or FileContentResult) would best suit this purpose.
A major obstacle I am facing is that the image is not stored in any directory on the server, so simply returning a FilePath to the client won’t work here.
I've attempted to use return File and return FileContentResult without success. Another idea I had was to return a string containing a Base64String representation of the image to the client and display it in a modal dialog, but this approach has its drawbacks since the image size might exceed the dimensions of the modal window.