Blobs

Description — Couchbase Lite database data model concepts - blobs
Related Content — Databases | Documents | Indexing

Introduction

Couchbase Lite for React Native uses blobs to store the contents of images, other media files and similar format files as binary objects.

The blob itself is not stored in the document. It is held in a separate content-addressable store indexed from the document and retrieved only on-demand.

When a document is synchronized, the Couchbase Lite replicator adds an _attachments dictionary to the document's properties if it contains a blob — see Figure 1.

Blob Objects

The blob as an object appears in a document as dictionary property — see, for example avatar in Figure 1.

Other properties include length (the length in bytes), and optionally content_type (typically, its MIME type).

The blob's data (an image, audio or video content) is not stored in the document, but in a separate content-addressable store, indexed by the digest property — see Using Blobs.

Constraints

• Couchbase Lite

  Blobs can be arbitrarily large. They are only read on demand, not when you load a the document.

• Capella App Services/Sync Gateway

  The maximum content size is 20 MB per blob. If a document's blob is over 20 MB, the document will be replicated but not the blob.

Using Blobs

The Blob API lets you access the blob's data content as in-memory data or as a Stream of Uint8Array.

The code in Example 1 shows how you might add a blob to a document and save it to the database. Here we use avatar as the property key and a jpeg file as the blob data.

Example 1. Working with Blobs

// Example function to simulate fetching binary data for an avatar image
const imageData = await fetchAvatarImageData();

// Create a Blob instance with the image data and content type
const avatarBlob = new Blob('image/jpeg', imageData);

// Retrieve an existing document
const document = await collection.document(documentId);

// Assign the Blob to the document under the 'avatar' key
document.setBlob('avatar', avatarBlob);

// Save the updated document back to the database
await collection.save(document);

Example 2. Get Blob's content

// code for setting blob
const encoder = new TextEncoder();
const blobEncoded = new Blob("text/plain", encoder.encode("Hello World"));
doc.setBlob('textBlob', blobEncoded);

// code for getting blob's content
const textDecoder = new TextDecoder();
const blobArrayBuffer = await doc.getBlobContent('textBlob', collection);
const textBlobResults = textDecoder.decode(blobArrayBuffer);

Syncing

When a document containing a blob object is synchronized, the Couchbase Lite replicator generates an _attachments dictionary with an auto-generated name for each blob attachment. This is different to the avatar key and is used internally to access the blob content.

If you view a sync'd blob document in either Capella's Admin Interface or Couchbase Server's Admin Console, you will see something similar to Figure 1, which shows the document with its generated _attachments dictionary, including the digest.

Figure 1. Sample Blob Document

{
  "_attachments": {
    "blob_1": {
      "content_type": "image/jpeg",
      "digest": "sha1-F1Tfe61RZP4zC9UYT6JFmLTh2s8=",
      "length": 8112955,
      "revpos": 2,
      "stub": true
    }
  },
  "avatar": {
    "@type": "blob",
    "content_type": "image/jpeg",
    "digest": "sha1-F1Tfe61RZP4zC9UYT6JFmLTh2s8=",
    "length": 8112955
  }
}