Search Style URL Redirecting to Single File

[chugmonkey]

Hi Folks,

 

This is my first post here but I've been a reader for a long time.

 

I've been given an interesting task in work which I have claimed can be easily done using PHP and MySQL. However, I'm not quite sure exactly how 

 

There are a little over 1.1m PDF files on my web server which are scanned invoices for my company. They all have an 8/9 digit serialised filename like 12345678.pdf and are stored in hierarchical, chronological folders.

i.e. /root/scanned/2010/01/12345678.pdf

 

They go back to 2004 at the moment.

 

My goal is to be able to create a single link to any file using something along the lines of http://myserver/wizard.php?docid=12345678

 

Now, I have a working search which displays a page containing a link using sphider but the ideal would be me clicking the link above and a PDF being served to me, rather than a results page.

 

I can't see any solutions like this anywhere and wondered if anyone has tried to do this before?

 

ANY help or suggestions would be most appreciated.

 

Best Regards, Pete

[Alex]

You could create a simple script to loop through all the directories and store the location of each file in MySQL. Then finding the location of the correct pdf to serve to the user given the filename would only take a quick MySQL query.

[chugmonkey]

Clearly I was tunnel visioned in thinking that this should/would be on-the-fly.

 

Many thanks Alex, I'll get onto it straightaway! I greatly appreciate your prompt response 

[Alex]

Based on the sheer scale and number of files you're dealing with it really wouldn't be practical to this on the fly. Imagine searching aimlessly through 1.1 million files every time you needed to find something? That would be a mess