Automatically determine size of multimedia content and populate the width and height in the macro browser.

During implementation of the flash embedding for the multimedia macro, I introduced some functionality to extract the width and height of the flash file, and automatically render it to that height. This is "nice to have" functionality that was not in the original scope, and was added as it was a quickwin.

This had the main drawback for having to read the initial contents of the attachment for each page render. It's been removed for the moment, and users will need to manually enter the width and height.

A few alternatives to prevent this overhead include:

• Get the dimensions when selecting the attachment in the browser (complicates the UI code)
• Add meta-data to attachments:
  • Store in lucene (no db changes, or migration tasks). Downside is delay in this information being available until the next index (up to 1 minute). This is probably a small issue as adding attachments to the current page under edit is not obvious (but can be done).
  • Store as addition data in the database against an attachment (e.g. key/value pairs). May slow down upload, as extraction of metadata will occur at upload. Metadata will be immediately available.
  • Other benefits include potential to extract other meta-data which may be searchable (e.g. mp3 tags, word document keywords, etc).

The preferred option is to add meta-data to attachments. The particular method for storing this is to be determined.

Daniel is already planning on adding metadata information for attachments as part of a 20% project. So this can be revisited when the outcome of that project is complete.