[mod_python] Dynamic <IMG> with PIL

Hi Robert,

An image tag in your document won't contain any actual image data, it
simply provides a URL which the browser uses to fetch that image data.
 So in order to do what you want to do, you'll need at least two
separate handlers: one to generate the initial page and one to
generate some dynamic image content.
To explain a little better: after a browser initially loads an HTML
page, it will find the SRC attribute for each IMG tag and then perform
a *separate* HTTP request to that URL, and expect some understandable
image data back.  So you will need to generate the image content
separately from the page, and vice versa.

The suggestion that you posted is probably pretty close to what you
will want to do:  you'll have a hander which generates your image in
PIL, sets the content type, and writes the properly encoded image data
(and nothing else) to the request.  I don't use publisher, but I'm
pretty sure this will NOT work with publisher, you will probably have
to write a small custom handler to do this.  Might look something like
this pseudocode (note I haven't tested this in any way):

from cStringIO import StringIO  #Way to hold the encoded image data, for now

def handler(req):
    #Grab whatever parameters you need...
    #Generate a PIL image, let's call it img....

    s = StringIO()
    img.save(s, 'jpeg')  #We have to encode this as a jpeg or similar format,
                                #if we send the raw PIL data the
client won't understand it

    s.seek(0)
    req.content_type = 'image/jpeg'  #Or whatever matches what we save
it as above

    #Would be nice to set the content length, too...

    req.write(s.getvalue()) #Send the encoded image data as our body
    return apache.OK

A good place to start might be setting this up so you can enter a url
like /myimagehanlder?id=foo and have it display just the image in your
browser.  Then integrating it into your page may make more sense.  I
would also recommend implementing some kind of caching mechanism, as
the above code will be a lot of work for your server.

HTH,

Colin



On 5/18/07, Robert Norman <tfcrobert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to create graphs on the fly with mod-python.  Using PIL I can get
> a "jpeg" image as a string. Is there some way to wrap this information in an
> IMG tag?  I gather that  src parameter in IMG is required so anythink like:
>
> req.write("<IMG %s>"  % myString)
>
> is not going to work.
>
> One suggestion was to:
>
>  <img src=" get-graph.py?graphId=xyz" />
>
> where:
>
> "get-graph.py is a python script. it sets the header to "image/jpeg" or
> whatever format you want to use than you can use some python libraries to
> create the image. Instead of saving the image to a file you just write it to
> stdout."
>
> I don't understand the suggestion especially in the context of mod-python
> since we want to use req to write the page.
>
> What is a reasonable method to generate dynamic image graphics?
>
> Robert
>
>
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