I'm still figuring out how to integrate stuff in and out of Zope, and thanks to all the people who gave me the friendly advice that I should stay away from storing blobs in databases (I kind of knew that already, but guess I was to busy worrying about marshalling things in and out of Zope). Anyway, what I am trying to do now is create an external method that will receive the REQUEST object with some fields AND the uploaded file. This external method will insert a record into an SQL table and return a unique ID which I will use for the filename for storing the image in the local filesystem (I am not worried about LOTS of images in a single directory - that can be solved by a more intelligent filesystem [ReiserFS?] or by some clever directory indexing). Assuming I am able to pull this off, it should be quite easy to pull the image back in again using the LocalFS product or my own external method. I guess the external method will be run in the same process and thread as the Zope process itself, so I would really like to get hold of the database connection from my database connection instance in Zope.

From searching the lists, I have learned:

* How to get the ZODB instance using self._p_jar; but this is not what I need. I need to get the database object for my MySQL database, not ZODB * How to call ZSQL methods from external methods by simply doing self.someZSQLmethod The last method would probably work, but since adding something to my database table really consists of a database insert, then getting the unique ID returned and using this for stuffing an image into the local filesystem, I would prefer to keep this all in the same External method. So the question then is: How can I obtain the database connection to the external database (the "Z MySQL Database Connection" in my case)? And I do not mean the connection to ZODB. Thanks, Marius Kjeldahl