you have the solution correctly
just make a trigger to extract the first x chars from the blob before insert
and before update.
you may need to use a UDF to extract this substring - the FreeUDFLib has a
few functions for this purpose.
Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Ulrich [mailto:ulrich.groffy@...]
Sent: Wednesday, 2 April 2003 6:27 PM
To: ib-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ib-support] alphabetical sorting in textblobs


Hello,

I have the following question/problem :

Not to be limited in article descriptions in an article-table, I defined the
article-description field as textblob. I would like to give the user the
opportunity to view the article list ordered numerical by article-number or
alphabetical by description. But I noticed that the SQL instruction "order
by description" inside TIB_Cursor is ignored. The description datafield is
defined as text-blob with a lenght of 80 (characters, bytes?). The
data-definition-guide says : Only a blob ID is stored in the table, but the
data itself is stored elsewhere. So if I say "order by blobXY" it means that
I receive some sorted blob-ids? If it's not possible to sort a text-blob
alphabetical, what might be a practical solution? I thought about to take
the first two or three words out of the text blob, put it in an varchar
field and make the "order by" clause on this field. But I have to care for
automatically update this varchar field if somebody change the text inside
the text blob. Strange solution? Is there an easy solution I don't see?

Best regards - Ulrich




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