At 08:02 AM 26/02/2004 +0100, you wrote:

>Helen,
>
>H> But something like
>H> a text format that includes both data and blobs I can't relate to...
>
>never received an e-mail with an attachment?
>The world is full of text encoding methods for binary data.

Oh, sure! And I (like most of us) have apps built with IBO to decode
emails. But that isn't what the question was about...or did I miss part of it?

>Anyway (just to make this post not entirely useless <g>) the
>IB_DataPump is not the same as IBX's batch output/input. Perhaps the
>IB_Export/IB_Import pair is a better match, but I can't say whether
>they support text blobs or not since I am away from Delphi at the
>moment. I guess they do.

They don't. ib_export can export various delimited text formats from a
query and it can import various ascii file formats into a destination
table. You could jump into events and somehow interven to recognise a
certain stream from yea-symbol to yea-symbol as being a blob, and handle it
with some TIB_ColumnBlob methods, but the components themselves don't
handle blobs.

If IBX has a component that's doing this in an encapsulated way, then IBO
doesn't have an equivalent. But the datapump *is* the equivalent of Don
Gollahon's "RawInput" example. The IBX I have here doesn't have such a
component, but my version is about a year old. It could be something that
shipped on the companion CD with Delphi 7 (which I don't have).

Helen