what the Blob is this ?

drowan · October 6th, 2003, 07:41 AM

I'm accessing a SQLserver dbase with (classic) ASP as scripting language. I have to retrieve BLOB records and extract the Html data contained in them as optional parts of the ASP web page.

I've never used BLOB records before, so I'd appreciate any advice on how to use them.

My spec. also says that each BLOB record could contain a complete web page in Html, so any help to extract the html would be great. I suppose I'd have to strip off the <html> to <body> and </body> </html> tags as the parent page already has them ??

Thanks for any help

Daniel Walker · October 7th, 2003, 05:01 AM

Alright, this is an unhelpful question, but my sense of moral outrage at seeing a database so used compels me to ask: why are the files stored in the database as BLOBs, when their paths could have been stored as text-type felds? This would be a far simpler solution. If you have already been presented with some crufty old database containing thirteen billion HTML files, all stored as BLOBs, then obviously you will have to make the best fist of it, but if I can intervene in the design process of this database before it's too late, I'd like to....

drowan · October 8th, 2003, 02:34 AM

The design is a done deal I'm afraid.
The dbase is a proprietary Customer Relationship Management s/ware to which we are adding extra data. The extra sections are presented to the customer (within the CRM) as a MS Word document which they can update themselves (without knowledge of Html). The Word doc is then stored as Html in the Blob record. I have then to present this Html/Blob data on the corresponding website WITIHN an existing web page. There's approx. 50 web pages with 6 optional extra sections. It's not very pretty but I'm stuck with it.
Thanks for the comment anyway

pgtips · October 10th, 2003, 04:15 AM

When you say BLOBs you're talking about (N)Text datatype, not image, right? And you only need to read them, not insert/update them? If this is the case just treat them as you would a char or varchar, for example SELECT theBLOB FROM TableName WHERE whatever, and strVariable = rsName.Fields("theBLOB").Value will work just fine.

there are methods like GetChunk available which you can use to get bits of the field at a time, but in my experience you don't need these unless the amount of data in the BLOB is very big (I've seen it suggested that "very big" means over 2GB, personally I've only had to deal with Text <= 200K and I've never needed GetChunk).

hth
Phil