Greetings:

I was made aware of an issue this week where clients have been sending in videos of their animals and staff have been adding them to medical records. The large file size of some of these was causing some backup issues (if resetting max_allowed_packet, don't forget to set it as well in [mysqldump]). Some education is warranted as some of these video files are huge and of limited medical value.  But it did bring up the issue of the wisdom of storing large attachments in the database in the first place.  I believe that the preferred solution would be to park those large files elsewhere (such as a local file server) and provide links to those files within the medical record.

While the link can be put into the record easily enough, it would be great if it would behave like a link and either be clickable (opening in a new tab) or shown in the record as any other attachment or image.  For this, I would suggest an additional option within the New Medical Record window of "Link" in addition to the existing options of Attachment, Form, Image, etc.

Maybe I shouldn't worry about this and just keep cranking up the max_allowed_packet size, but my gut feeling is that linking out might be wiser in the long run.

Thanks,

Sam
Kamloops, Canada