File upload by providing a URL vs. file contents

Vectara Platform Feature Requests
1

As the title says: your file upload API requires the file contents to be passed with the API call. I’m using a low-code tool that only lets me pass text/strings to an API.
If I upload a file to this tool(bubble.io) I get back a URL that is not secure(which seems crazy).
I’d like to upload to that location, then immediately upload to vectara by passing that URL, and once complete, delete it off the non-secure storage.
Because you require the file contents in the payload, I cannot make this solution work.
note: the intention is NOT to use vectara as a drive; but, to then allow the users of the app to query their files, and use that in generative AI calls built in the app.

2

Hey @David_Cawley
I’m not super familiar with bubble, but I’m wondering if you could utilize the Vectara integration with Airbyte or Unstrucrured-Ingest? For example with Airbyte - you could move the file into Google Drive and then setup a sync from Google Drive into Vectara using the Vectara Destination connector for Airbyte.

3

Thank you I appreciate you taking time to help,

There are definitely work arounds like this that are possible, but every ‘hop’ is a potential failure point. I’m asking for this because it ‘feels’ possible and potentially valuable to more people than just me.
It looks like airbyte is an open source tool, so I’d have to run my own instance of airbyte somewhere to make this work?

I’m not familiar with ‘unstructured-ingest’.

But… I don’t write API’s or administer a company like Vectara, so maybe there are very good reasons that this is not what they do, and they never will.

This page seems to show passing a path to the file upload api, is this still possible? could that path be a web link vs. a drive reference?

4

Hi @David_Cawley
Yes this has to be a local file. Unfortunately this does not support retrieving from a URL at this time, thus my recommendation to try airbyte or unstructured. And yes Airbyte is open source although they also have a cloud offering

1 Like
5

I was able to get this working, thank you for your help, bubble actually can pass file contents, they just made it tricky for someone new like me, I have it working now - I love it.

1 Like