Upload files of size up to 32 MB, in your online database

iFreeTools Creator, your online database application builder built for hosting on Google App Engine, has had support for image fields since the early days. These image fields used Google App Engine's datastore to store the files. Due to the design of the App Engine datastore, the maximum file size for these fields was limited to 1 MB. We had an automatic size-reduction enabled for these fields, to reduce the file sizes of the uploaded files. This field has been serving our free-users and our paid-customers well until now.

For bigger files, there was always the option of storing them within Google Drive and attaching the files from Google Drive to database records. But these attachments are treated different from the normal fields. So, some clients have been requesting support for bigger file uploads.

Based on a prioritization request from our client, we have now enabled support for bigger file uploads for our paid single-tenant deployment customers.

Paid deployments will now have an option to add new attributes with Image / File Upload (Big) data-type.

These new attributes will store the file contents in Google App Engine's blobstore. The blobstore allows files of sizes up to 32 MB to be uploaded, utilizing the 5 GB free blobstore quota, offered by Google for all Google App Engine applications.

Additional storage will be billed at $0.026/GB/month (payable to Google) :
https://developers.google.com/appengine/pricing#Billable_Resource_Unit_Costs

We have started rolling in this feature for our paid customers. If you are a paid customer of iFreeTools, you should see this feature available in your deployment very soon.

Do you have a feature request for iFreeTools that you want to be prioritized? Get in touch with us, so that we take this forward.

Image fields now supported in the Free Online Database builder for Google Apps

We have now added support for defining and using Image fields in iFreeTools. This has been enabled for the Products database in iFreeTools CRM and can also be used for your custom online databases, using iFreeTools Creator.

A sample view of such a database listing is given below in a snapshot of a Travel Desk application built using iFreeTools Creator. The thumbnails of the images are listed in this table view..


When you proceed to the individual record's details page, you can see a bigger image..


When adding/editing records, you have options to either upload a new image or using an already uploaded image from the database of uploaded files. The options available for editing the image fields are show in this below image..


All uploaded files can be managed easily from Back-end Data > Uploaded Files, where CSV files used in importing data are also listed..


You could rename the files and change the descriptions or even, download the file from the details page..


When adding/editing the attribute you could specify the maximum file size for the image. For free versions the options available are 10, 25, 50 and 75 (all sizes in KB). If the uploaded image is of bigger size, the app will try to resize and reduce the file size to confirm to your settings..


You can go in for bigger image sizes when we open up our paid plans or if you go in for our custom deployment options, which enables you to use the 1 GB free quota from Google and to purchase additional resources directly from Google at $0.15/GB/month.

The rates for custom deployments start at $99/year (works out to $8.25/month) for upto 25 users (or $0.33/user/month). For unlimited users, it is just $299/year.

Hope you like our new feature. Do feel free to send in your suggestions using the feedback form in our apps or directly via mail to raj@sahasvat.com