At 09:52 AM 5/7/00 +1000, Helen Borrie wrote:

>
>That still doesn't solve the problem of storing text blobs (text files such
>as HTML and XML, and rtf) if they must be handled as strings. How would
>one surmount the problem of reserved characters? It could blow away the
>huge market of customers who want to use InterBase (as I do) as a really
>fast way to store static, formatted plain text.
>

Really, there isn't a problem here. You can store whatever you
want however you want. As long as you don't ask the engine to
fetch your blob in a partiticular format, the engine won't do
you any "favors". If you ask for text, however, the engine will
try to find a filter to do the transactions. RTF is an excellent
example. Give it a subtype and define a filter between that
subtype and text. String operations will run the blob through
the filter before applying the function (I didn't say it was
free) and everything works. Define a blob filter between text
and RTF, and the assignment code could (doesn't now) would run
a literal through the filter to get RTF. Nothing get brokens.
The beast just works in an intuitive manner.

The motivation for blob filters was exactly that -- translating
between various markup systems and text and transmogrifying
image formats. The feature hasn't gotten a lot of press, but
it solves a zillion problems. Just don't let Mr. Karwin put
their descriptions in a system wide configuration file, please.

Jim Starkey