Downloading blob content

I missed this in the previous blog entry. The SDK makes it really trivial to extract blob data. For text content you can directly get the text, and for non-text content you can either download to a file or to a stream. The code snippet below shows how it’s done.

void DownloadBlobData()
{
  auto storage_account = cloud_storage_account::parse(
      U("UseDevelopmentStorage=true"));
  auto blob_client = storage_account.create_cloud_blob_client();
  auto container = blob_client.get_container_reference(
      U("textdata"));
  bool created = container.create_if_not_exists();

  // Read the text content directly
  auto text_blob1 = container.get_block_blob_reference(
      U("texts/text1"));
  auto text = text_blob1.download_text();
  ucout << text << endl;

  // Download the blob data to a file
  auto text_blob2 = container.get_block_blob_reference(
      U("texts/text2"));
  text_blob2.download_to_file(
      U("d:\\tmp\\blobdata.txt"));

  // Download the blob data to an ostream
  stringstreambuf buffer;
  concurrency::streams::ostream output(buffer);
  text_blob2.download_to_stream(output);
  cout << buffer.collection() << endl;
}