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Blobstore crash course It’ll be best if we gave a quick refresher course on the blobstore before we begin. Here’s the standard flow for a blobstore upload: Create a new blobstore session and generate an upload URL for a form to POST to. This is done using the createUploadUrl() method of BlobstoreService. Pass a callback URL to this method. This URL is where the user will be forwarded after the upload has completed. Present an upload form to the user. The action is the URL generated in step 1. Each URL must be unique: you cannot use the same URL for multiple sessions, as this will cause an error. After the URL has uploaded the file, the user is forwarded to the callback URL in your App Engine application specified in step 1. The key of the uploaded blob, a String blob key, is passed as an URL parameter. Save this URL and pass the user to their final destination

The Blobstore API provides two types of functions:   An ability to upload and save the blob automaticallyThe BlobstoreService which is provided by the com.google.appengine.api.blobstore.BlobstoreService allows us to specify a URL where users can upload their large files. You can think of this url as the action element in the HTML form. The implementation at this URL is internal to the BlobstoreService. But what it does is significant. It will extract out the file contents that you uploaded and store it as a Blob in the database. Each blob that is stored in the database is associated with the a Blob Key. This Blob key is then provided to your url and you can then use the Blob Key to do anything within your application. In our case, we form a url that is tweeted to the users who can then view the picture that we uploaded. An ability to serve or retrieve the blob.The BlobstoreService also provides an ability to serve or retrieve the blob that was saved successfully. It will provide the blob as a response that could then use as a source in an <img> element for example. All you need to do is provide it the Blob Key and the response stream and in return, it will provide the content properly encoded as per its type that you could then use.

Personally, I would recommend using the blobstore API for this since it is officially supported by google and means it won't break in the future. It also has nice bindings into the imageservice. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/blobstore/overview.html

The most obvious use case is data import. A developer looking to import large amounts of data would take the following steps: Create a CSV file containing the data you want to import. The assumption here is that each line of data corresponds to a datastore entity you want to create Upload the CSV file to the blobstore. You’ll need billing to be enabled for this to work. Create your Mapper, push it live and run your job importing your data. This isn’t meant to be a replacement for the bulk uploader tool; merely an alternative. This method requires a good amount more programmatic changes for custom data transforms. The advantage of this method is that the work is done on the server side, whereas the bulk uploader makes use of the remote API to get work done. Let’s get started on each of the steps.

to build Mappers that map across some large, contiguous piece of data as opposed to Entities in the datastore

The mapper API isn't just limited to mapping over datastore entities, either. You can map over lines in a text file in the blobstore, or over the contents of a zip file in the blobstore. It's even possible to write your own data sources