Links to attachments on ticket made of embedded images are broken

alphaTECH

I'm playing around with ITFlow, and created a test ticket via the email parser. The embedded images are correctly attaching to the ticket, however the links are broken. I'm not sure why this is happening. The files are present but their names are much shorter than they're supposed to be, according to the links.

Link to attachment in ticket:

Actual file name:

alphaTECH

I think I know why this is happening. eM Client embeds images into emails using base64 encoding in PNG format. ITFlow is confused by this and correctly stores the embedded image as a working file, just with the wrong filename for some reason.

I've tested embedded images both ways with Proton Mail web client and it works flawlessly. I assume the other big names like Outlook and Thunderbird also embed images differently to eM Client which is why this issue hasn't come up before now.

zm-brian

I'm experiencing an issue similar to yours but don't have anything on the file system of the server.

Here's a screenshot of part of a ticket in our system. I was able to paste images directly in the text box.

I pasted several images into the ticket and then when the customer responded, I went back into the ticket and saw links to download or to view the image. I figured IT Flow took the pasted images, created an image file, and then persisted the image files to disk.

When I click on the "View" link, it shows me:

I removed the real url because the domain name doesn't matter for my point, but when hovering over the hyperlink it shows the url to be: https://itflow.domain.com/uploads/tickets/13/8152366fe40d2db70993f0d562d69f7c.png

If I check directly on the server, this is the tickets directory:

There are no subfolders within the "tickets" directory (this is the first time I pasted an image into a ticket). I checked the permissions for the root folder of IT Flow and all subfolders, it's not an incorrect permissions issue on the server side.

Then I thought to myself, if the link to the picture isn't valid, how is it still displaying it on the page? So, I started up Developer Tools and noticed something. (The red line just has text that was added to the ticket and has customer related information. It has no value towards what I'm trying to show/explain here).

It seems that if I paste an image into the TinyMCE editor box on any ticket edit page (/ticket.php?ticket_id=XX) and click on Submit, the image is encoded to base64 binary and then that value is being persisted to the database and an image file is not being persisted to disk.

Lastly, I'm running php8.2-fpm with Apache on a fully updated Ubuntu server.

And I want to thank @johnny and @wrongecho for being as active as they are in the forum. You guys have been crazy helpful. And thank you to everyone contributing to this project! You guys are awesome!

wrongecho

Hey both

Thanks for your kind words @zm-brian

Images pasted into tickets are currently just left in the database. Moving them from base64 to the file system was the eventual plan, but it does have some disadvantages as it makes replies harder to follow.

Images in emails (in line or as attachments in general) are saved to disk. I think this might have broken when we changed email parser as the change also broke the ability to see the original email message. Need to look into.

zm-brian

wrongecho Gotcha. I would rather all images be stored in the database. That would keep all the data in one place except for "Files".

wrongecho

zm-brian

We should look more into what the best practice is around disk/database. I would have assumed it's disk but a quick google shows there's a bit more to it than I thought.