The Bizcloud host is primarily a way for businesses to manage their business information and is not intended as a storage service for media such as images. Nevertheless images may be included in workspace forms by using the url of an available and public image.  These images should be public of course, or they cannot be viewed unless permission is granted to each user in some manner, or the image url is complex enough unpredictable so that random users can practically only view an image if the url is known to them.

A further requirement is that ownership of images and their control, and therefore their storage,  is best handled by the business itself. The Bizcloud Image Storage Service is specifically  built as a very simple service that puts the responsibility and control where it should be, i.e.: in the hands of the business itself. This is achieved by providing an installable image storage service that may be placed on a server controlled by the workspace owner. The service allows images to be stored and automatically named. The service provides an image link or name  that is used to access the image by users of a workspace.

The image storage service is available through a small image cropper UI. Credit to inCoder for making a repository available at https://github.com/InCoderWeb/Image-Editor-InCoderWeb. This basic code was adapted for this purpose. This allows the user to drag and drop images or upload from a local folder. The portion of the image that is needed may be cropped. The cropped image portion is then saved in the image store and the resulting image location is inserted into the field of the form where it is needed.

This chapter provides information on how to:

• Install and setup the service for the first time
• How the service works, fundamentally
• How the service can be including into a utility or jig, as may be required by a developer

Still To Be Done

1. Check for service activation status and display message if service is not active
2. Check and apply to remaining forms, jigs and utilities. Currently available only in:

1. Universal UI
2. Forms of type ‘user-auth’ (~/forms/user-auth)

3. Script to update core files from repository based on the repo manifest