Download from External Database - Issues with Bubble Uploading to Own Database

Need help Database
1

Hey there,

I am using an external amazon S3 database. I want users to be able to download their files. They click an icon and I run a GET request on the S3 URL and at this point Bubble automatically adds the file to the Bubble Database.

I can then download the file with the download file plugin and specify the result of step 1 (the get request to S3) and give a filename of a random string.

As it seems Bubble is automatically adding these files to the database without attaching to any data structure, is there a way that I can clean them up after this happens or prevent it from happening at all? I see that we now have like 13,000 files created this way so it isn’t really ideal to go into the file manager and delete them manually but we made our app this way as we knew we’d hit the expensive bubble limits but this is a major blocker.

Any ideas are welcome.

2

Do you have a way to retrieve just the URL of your file in your GET request? Then you can pass that URL directly to your download action and bypass Bubble storage

3

hey tyler11, yes I do. I am actually storing the S3 link already somewhere in the database so is it possible to use that value already, I use it to show images on the background of a repeating group.

Thanks for any help!

4

Yea try that, I noticed as soon as Bubble sees a “file” incoming it immediately stores it in your app. And it’s one giant pool of files so it’s left up to us to attach that file to a thing in our workflows.

Also maybe someone can chime in but I noticed any file retrieved from an API is public so anyone with a link can see it…

The direct URL download method should just bypass all the Bubble file stuff

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