Retrieving images from a dabatase in ASP.NET MVC

If you run into a ASP.NET MVC site that needs to get images stored as binary data in a SQL database you can do the following to help you read these images and display them in your view.

The Controller

First, create a controller that will serve these images and add a void method that requires the image id as parameter to locate the right image to serve. In the example below I used the Adventure Works database and Linq to query the database and read an image stored in MS SQL. Make sure you set the content type to the right type of image file you’ll be getting from the database, in the example below I used “image/gif” as the content type.

The View

In your view, you only need to use the Url.Action helper to form the url to the image stored in the database by calling the method in the image controller you just created (see above).

“Show” is the name of our method and “Image” is the name of the controller, what’s on the right to “id=” is just the image id that I want to get.