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Platform: Oracle 9iR2 / Sun Solaris 9



Maybe this is actually a post more suited to an XML newsgroup, but does
anyone know if you can (a) embed binary data into an xml document and
(b) whether Oracle's tools using XMLTYPE will automatically handle the
storage of that binary data?

We have successfully implemented inserting XML documents into Oracle
tables defined e.g.

create global temporary table xml_jobs of xmltype;

and then defining views on that table based on the XML schema defintion.

The requirment in summary is that a 3rd party wishes to send us some
structured data and an embedded MS Word (or other binary) document in a
single XML document. I think the suggestion is that the content of the
MS Word document will be encoded before it is sent and then we woould
have to decode it upon receipt - actually I guess this would then
actually make the question about whether binary data can be included
redundant - then the question would be actually just how would you "re-
form" the MS word (or whatever) document using pl/sql?

An alternative that has ben suggested is that one of the fields in the
XML document would be a URL where the MS Word document can be found and
then from within pl/sql we could use utl_http to get the document?

Thanks for any pointers or thoughts from anyone who has done anything
similar.

cheers

--

jeremy

On Wed, 4 May 2005 08:29:00 +0100, Jeremy
<newspostings@hazelweb.co.uk> wrote:

>Platform: Oracle 9iR2 / Sun Solaris 9
>
>
>
>Maybe this is actually a post more suited to an XML newsgroup, but does
>anyone know if you can (a) embed binary data into an xml document and
>(b) whether Oracle's tools using XMLTYPE will automatically handle the
>storage of that binary data?
>
>We have successfully implemented inserting XML documents into Oracle
>tables defined e.g.
>
>create global temporary table xml_jobs of xmltype;
>
>and then defining views on that table based on the XML schema defintion.
>
>The requirment in summary is that a 3rd party wishes to send us some
>structured data and an embedded MS Word (or other binary) document in a
>single XML document. I think the suggestion is that the content of the
>MS Word document will be encoded before it is sent and then we woould
>have to decode it upon receipt - actually I guess this would then
>actually make the question about whether binary data can be included
>redundant - then the question would be actually just how would you "re-
>form" the MS word (or whatever) document using pl/sql?
>
>An alternative that has ben suggested is that one of the fields in the
>XML document would be a URL where the MS Word document can be found and
>then from within pl/sql we could use utl_http to get the document?
>
>Thanks for any pointers or thoughts from anyone who has done anything
>similar.
>
>cheers

If it's encoded, it will probably be something like base64. Google
that. Also, check out this link.
http://www.perfectxml.com/articles/xml/binary.asp

I've olny used UTL_HTTP to get HTML but utl_http does support
READ_RAW. I'm guessing you could use that to pull from a url.

Hope that helps,

Lewis

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Lewis R Cunningham

Author, ItToolBox Blog: An Expert's Guide to Oracle
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Topic Editor, Suite101.com: Oracle Database
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