Using GridFS in MongoDb from C#

GridFS is a specification for storing large files in MongoDB. GridFS will chunk a file into documents, and the official C# driver supports GridFS.

The following class wraps some of the driver classes (MongoDatabase and MongoGridFS):

public class MongoGridFs
{
    private readonly MongoDatabase _db;
    private readonly MongoGridFS _gridFs;

    public MongoGridFs(MongoDatabase db)
    {
        _db = db;
        _gridFs = _db.GridFS;
    }

    public ObjectId AddFile(Stream fileStream, string fileName)
    {
        var fileInfo = _gridFs.Upload(fileStream, fileName);
        return (ObjectId)fileInfo.Id;
    }

    public Stream GetFile(ObjectId id)
    {
        var file = _gridFs.FindOneById(id);
        return file.OpenRead();           
    }
}

The following code uses the above class to put a file into MongoDB, then read it back out.

var fileName = "clip_image071.jpg";

var client = new MongoClient();
var server = client.GetServer();
var database = server.GetDatabase("testdb");
var gridFs = new MongoGridFs(database);

var id = ObjectId.Empty;            
using(var file = File.OpenRead(fileName))
{
    id = gridFs.AddFile(file, fileName);
}

using(var file = gridFs.GetFile(id))
{
    var buffer = new byte[file.Length];
    // note - you'll probably want to read in
    // small blocks or stream to avoid 
    // allocating large byte arrays like this
    file.Read(buffer, 0, (int)file.Length);
}